Word.ws English Dictionary

PWT

PWT is the initialism of Pacific War Time.

PWT is the initialism of poor white trash.

Meaning of poor white trash

Noun

poor white trash (uncountable)

  1. (US, ethnic, obsolete, slur) White person or people employed in a servile position, for example, as a butler.
    • In the south, there are no servants but blacks; for the greater proportion of domestics being slaves all species of servitude whatever is looked upon as a degradation; and the slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash’.[1835 May 30, The London Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c.of the collected Literary Gazette […] for the year 1835, number 958, London, page 388
    Synonyms:
    mean white
  2. (US, derogatory, ethnic, modern, slur) A poor, uneducated white person or group of people of low social status.
    • Good nutrition's given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?1991, Ted Tally, The Silence of the Lambs (motion picture), spoken by Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins)
    Synonyms:
    white trash

Questions about PWT

What is PWT the initialism of?
PWT is the initialism of Pacific War Time.

Words near PWT in the dictionary

  1. PWPs
  2. pwr
  3. pwr.
  4. PWRs
  5. pws
  6. PWT
  7. PWUD
  8. PWYC
  9. PWYW
  10. px
  11. PX goods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: PWT (page history and authors); poor white trash (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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Cite this entry: “PWT.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pwt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.