yonders

1. 1
   adverb

   Nonstandard or dialect form of yonder.

   The old mule wandered off down yonders and never came back.

   You'll find the well yonders, behind the smokehouse.

   Note

   Writers reach for the s when they set dialect speech down as it sounds: George Eliot's Mrs Moss, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), says he is only in the potato-field yonders. The s changes nothing in the meaning, and the word follows whatever it locates, just as yonder does; plain yonder itself survives as a dialect word in the Southern US.

2. 2
   determinerarchaic

   Archaic alternative form of yonder.

   I see a horse on yonders plain Whose body's been but lately slain.

   1940, The University of Missouri Studies - Volume 15, Issue 1

   Had me a cat, the cat pleased me, I fed my cat in yonders tree, cat went fiddle-i-fee.

   1954, Ralph Steele Boggs, El folklore en los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica

   Note

   Folk songs keep this form alive before a noun: a horse on yonders plain, a cat fed in yonders tree, a lover met over yonders hill. It points the way that over there does. Outside quoted song and dialect, plain yonder is the form to write, and even that now sounds archaic.

3. 3
   nounliterary

   Plural of yonder.

   The settlers set out across the open yonders with little more than a wagon and a map.

   She spent her retirement chasing the yonders she had only read about.

   Note

   The singular is a literary word for a far reach of sky or wilderness, and the plural is at home in frontier writing: in Dan Parkinson's The Westering (1988), the yonders were still out there. Folksy talk turns it into a rough unit of distance, as J. Lee Butts does in Texas Bad Girls (2000) with a holler and a half and a few yonders from someone's old stomping grounds.

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