The story
- German · derived fromJokel
- English todayyokel
First use appears c. 1812, possibly from dialectal German Jokel, diminutive of Jakob, cf. Yankee (“little John”) and jacquerie (“a peasant uprising”). Alternatively, from dialectal English yokel, yuckle (“a European green woodpecker”), itself probably a variant of hickwall.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.