West Virginia

American  

noun

1. a state in the eastern United States. 24,181 sq. mi. (62,629 sq. km). Charleston. WV (for use with zip code), W.Va.

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West Virginia British  

noun

1. Abbreviation: W Va, W. Va., WV. a state of the eastern US: part of Virginia until the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861); consists chiefly of the Allegheny Plateau; bounded on the west by the Ohio River; coal-mining. Capital: Charleston. Pop: 1 810 354 (2003 est). Area: 62 341 sq km (24 070 sq miles)

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West Virginia Cultural  

1. State in the southeastern United States bordered by Pennsylvania and Maryland to the north, Virginia to the east and south, and Kentucky and Ohio to the west. Its capital and largest city is Charleston.

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Ranks first in bituminous coal production, with about twenty percent of the nation's total.

Separated from Virginia after Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861; it was granted statehood in 1863, during the Civil War.

Other Word Forms

• West Virginian
  adjective

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

West Virginia

The biggest specimen belonged to a Tennessee bottlebrush crayfish preserved in the collection at West Liberty University in West Virginia.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 16, 2026

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook.

From Salon ● Oct. 4, 2026

U.S. natural gas futures posted their biggest-single-day gain since January as a pipeline outage in West Virginia led to supply disruptions.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 25, 2026

He grew up in a farmhouse in the mountains of West Virginia.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 23, 2026

Prior to the Civil War, when West Virginia was still part of the state of Virginia, these ancestors of mine were slaves on a plantation called The Bower, in Leetown, Virginia.

From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers

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