Dixie is a historical nickname for the Southern United States.

As a definite geographic location within the United States, "Dixie" is usually defined as the eleven Southern states that seceded in late 1860 and early 1861 to form the new confederation named the Confederate States of America. They are (in order of secession): South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
However, the location and boundaries of "Dixie" have become, over time, more limited, vernacular, and mercurial. Today, it is most often associated with those parts of the Southern United States where traditions and legacies of the Confederate era and the antebellum South live most strongly.[5]
Many businesses in the South contain "Dixie" in their name as an identifier, such as supermarket chain Winn-Dixie.



According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origins of this nickname remain obscure. According to A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951), by Mitford M. Mathews, three theories most commonly attempt to explain the term:
The word "Dixie" refers to privately issued currency originally from the Citizens State Bank (located in the French Quarter of New Orleans) and then other banks in Louisiana.[6] These banks issued ten-dollar notes,[7] labeled "Dix", French for "ten", on the reverse side. The notes were known as "Dixies" by English-speaking southerners, and the area around New Orleans and the French-speaking parts of Louisiana came to be known as "Dixieland". Eventually, usage of the term broadened to refer to the Southern states in general.
The word preserves the name of a "Mr. Dixy", a slave owner on Manhattan Island, where slavery was legal until 1827 (see History of slavery in New York). His rule was so kind that "Dixy's Land" became famed far and wide as an elysium abounding in material comforts.
"Dixie" derives from Jeremiah Dixon, a surveyor of the Mason–Dixon line which defined the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and, for the most part, free and slave states. (Delaware, a Union border state, and slave state up to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, lay outside the "Dixie" side of the survey line.)