Word.ws English Dictionary

dueling banjos

dueling banjos noun: a contest of skill in which two people try to top each other's offerings, especially one involving musical ability.

Noun

dueling banjos pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) A contest of skill in which two people try to top each other's offerings, especially one involving musical ability.
    • The current discussion of choice in education has been driven by this dueling banjos mentality in which scholars and other intellectual entrepreneurs compete for public and intellectual attention by describing the conditions they want to create.1990, John F. Witte, William H. Clune, Choice and Control in American Education - Volume 2, →ISBN, page 217
    • Their tools were computers and when three or four engineers surrounded a car and plugged in, the scene wasn't dueling banjos. It was dueling laptops.1998, James Schefter, All Corvettes Are Red, →ISBN, page 311
  2. (plural, plural-only) Something typical of a stereotypic hillbilly; Something characterized by lack of education, poverty, inbreeding or lack of sophistication.
    • The name "Appalachia" evokes a host of popular images and stereotypes: feuds, individualism, moonshine, subsistence farming, quilting bees, illiteracy, and dueling banjos, to name just a few.1998, David Colin Crass, The Southern Colonial Backcountry, →ISBN, page 162
    • My family at times seem to think they are aristocrats, at other times I swear I can hear the muffled sound of dueling banjos.2000, J. Allen Myers, Spectre: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories, →ISBN, page 66

Examples of dueling banjos in a sentence

  • “Corn and soybeans are the dueling banjos of conventional agriculture that amount to little more than subsidized erosion,” says Thicke, laughing at his own critique.2003, Dan Imhoff, Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches.:
  • Anyway, Eric kept humming some dueling banjos song and talking about people who marry their first cousins.2014, Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans, →ISBN:

Origin of dueling banjos

From a scene in the 1972 film Deliverance in which a tourist with a guitar gets into a picking contest with a hillbilly on a banjo, both playing parts of the song "Dueling Banjos" (originally titled "Feuding Banjos") by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith.

Questions about dueling banjos

What does dueling banjos mean?
Dueling banjos means a contest of skill in which two people try to top each other's offerings, especially one involving musical ability.
How do you use dueling banjos in a sentence?
“Corn and soybeans are the dueling banjos of conventional agriculture that amount to little more than subsidized erosion,” says Thicke, laughing at his own critique.
What part of speech is dueling banjos?
Dueling banjos is a noun.

Words near dueling banjos in the dictionary

  1. duel
  2. dueled
  3. dueler
  4. duelers
  5. dueling
  6. dueling banjos
  7. dueling pistol
  8. dueling pistols
  9. dueling tree
  10. dueling trees
  11. duelings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dueling banjos (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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