Border States
Americanplural noun
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U.S. History. the Slave States of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which refused to secede from the Union in 1860–61.
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the U.S. states touching the Canadian border.
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certain countries of central and northern Europe that border on the former Soviet Union and belonged to the Russian Empire: Finland, Poland (prior to 1940), Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He owed his victory to Illinois, most of the smaller states in the West and Middle West, and particularly to the South and the Border States.
From Time Magazine Archive
He made a clean sweep of the Midwest, the Mountain and Border States, the West Coast, appeared to have lost only Arizona in the Southwest.
From Time Magazine Archive
With the West, South and Border States almost solidly for him, he apparently needed only a brace of Eastern States to coast home.
From Time Magazine Archive
They are the cornerstone, the bulwark, among which "bolts" and "splits" and outright transitions occur far less frequently than among the eleven Western States, the eleven Eastern States, the four Border States.
From Time Magazine Archive
The slaves must be freed in the Border States.
From History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II by Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
