Where did the saying (your neck of the woods) come from?

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Good question....
I know that kissing/making-out used to be called "necking" and a lot of teens would "neck in the woods" by there houses(in their neck of the woods).

Or it could mean - a path is similar to the shape of neck ....so "which path/neck leads to your home"



definition..
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/neck+of+the+woods...Show more

Some have suggested neck in this sense came from the Old Breton word cnoch and/or the Old German word hnack, both of which had a sense of "hill" or "summit" to identify a place.

Neck has, also, been used in England, since around 1555, to describe a narrow strip of land jutting out into the water, presumably because it resembled an animal's neck.

Early American settlers seem to have seen the same animal's neck in a narrow stand of trees or a logged settlement on the edge of a woods. Hence, your "neck of the woods" was your home or neighborhood.


nfd♥...Show more

Neck of the woods" is a particularly odd expression to use when you live in a city and that the nearest thing to a wood around your house is the trees that line your street. However, saying "in my neck of the woods, the binmen come on Mondays" makes me feel like survival is an everyday fight in Hove. It sounds as if I lived surrounded by bears and cougars instead of seagulls and squirrels and had to get up at dawn to milk cows for my cereal instead of going downstairs to pick up the bottle that Mick the milkman has kindly left on my doorstep.

I always thought that the expression came from a time when forests were everywhere in England and people lived Robin Hood-style. But what about "neck"? It can be used in a geographical sense; it is a narrow elongated projecting strip of land (according to my dictionary), which doesn't really fit with woods....Show more

I am not sure, but my Grand parents and Parents always used to say it. It's just folksy. TV weatherman Al Roker of the Today Show always introduces the local station's weather report by saying: "And here's what's happening in your neck of the woods." Where does the phrase neck of the woods come from? Thanksgiving brings to mind American pioneer settlements, so I decided to follow the holiday with this traditional American expression. Of course, many inanimate objects have necks: tools, bottles, bones, cannons and violins to name a few. In nature, neck has referred to any narrow strip of water, ice or trees. So, originally, neck of the woods meant a stretch of woodland. Sometime in the first half of the 19th century, people started referring to the settlements in remote wooded areas as a particular neck of the woods. The first print evidence of the expression is in 1839: "In this neck of the woods" (Sprit of Times 15 June 175/2, 1839). In a book of Americanisms, De Vere writes about the American pioneer: "He will. . .find his neighborhood designated as a neck of the woods, that being the name applied to any settlement made in the well-wooded parts of the South-west especially" (Americanisms: The English of the New World, 1871). Today, the expression is alive and well in almost every neck of the woods, though it no longer solely indicates a remote settlement. Neck of the woods now refers to any neighborhood, area or region. It is sometimes shortened to neck as in Wainright's Devil you Don't: "In this neck, I say what. I also say when."...Show more