cotton pickers
Boll harvesting equipment
Cotton pickers are workers who harvest cotton by hand, or machines that do the same job mechanically.
The phrase has historical weight in the American South, where enslaved people and later sharecroppers picked cotton under brutal conditions.
As a modifier in expressions like cotton-picking minute, the term functions as a mild oath—a sanitized substitute for stronger language: Get your cotton-picking hands off that!
- farmhandAgricultural employee
- field handAgricultural labor worker
- field workersAgricultural labor force
- fieldworkResearch conducted on location
- manual laborWork done bodily
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