An Americanism dating back to 1870–75
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In many of the areas of the Cotton Belt, slaves were the majority of the population.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 27, 2025
The co-authors chose communities to study in Appalachia, South Texas and the southern Cotton Belt that were representative from the bottom 200 of their list.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 8, 2023
Easily the raunchiest Confederate relic north of the Cotton Belt is Maryland’s never-in-mode state song, “Maryland, My Maryland.”
From Washington Post ● Apr. 9, 2021
Former Cotton Belt Railroad employee Ray Stevenson was born in 1961, just a toddler as segregation was ending for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From Washington Times ● Feb. 18, 2018
Then I’ve cooked four or five years in railroad camps, when they was puttin’ in this Cotton Belt track.
From Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Arkansas Narratives, Part 3 by Work Projects Administration
In 2009, India’s agricultural export agency discovered wide-scale fraud in the country’s cotton belt, with entire villages certifying genetically modified cotton as organic.
From New York Times ● Feb. 13, 2022
Born into slavery in the Georgia cotton belt in 1818, she was seemingly destined for a life of hard labor and a death in obscurity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2020
It may foreshadow the discovery of other forgotten slave cemeteries as the city of Tallahassee’s boundaries edge northward into the county’s former cotton belt.
From Washington Times ● Jun. 14, 2020
Across the central cotton belt, especially in Telangana and Maharashtra, at-risk farmers were particularly impoverished and often lacked irrigation infrastructure that would stabilize cotton farming.
From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2019
Some are of immense size and probably as large as can be found north of the cotton belt.
From Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting Battle Creek, Michigan, September 10 and 11, 1934 by Northern Nut Growers Association
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.
