Some of the words illustrated by Mark Twain quotations are chiefly dialectal; others are simply colorful.

Dialectal:

bang verb [beat; surpass; outdo]
“don’t it just bang anything you ever heard of”

blatter verb
“he blattered along and managed to inquire about pretty much everybody”

nation adverb [extremely] and noun [damnation]
“I’m nation sorry for you”; “how in the nation are these fellows going to be ransomed”

powerful adverb [very]
“was powerful glad to see me”

used to adverb [formerly]
“he ain’t as popular now as he used to was”

without conjunction [unless]
“you don’t know about me without you have read a book”

Just Plain Colorful:

clack noun [a gossiping tongue]
“her clack was going all day”

clodhopper noun
“clodhoppers…that never handled a sword”

dog-cheap adjective
“if you come across another dog-cheap house”

fringy adjective
“the gracefullest little fringy films of lace”

goad stick noun
“they banged the donkeys with their goad sticks”

huffy adjective
“stayed huffy a good while”

humbug noun
“these liars waren’t no kings nor dukes, at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds”

like sixty adverb
“it was raining like sixty”

lunkhead noun
“these lunkheads…couldn’t come up to Shakespeare”

mudsill noun
“a mudsill like me trying to push in and help”

paw verb
“don’t care to have the critics paw the book at all”

shin verb
“was up in a second and shinning down the hill”

stretcher noun
“a true book with some stretchers”

thinking noun
“full of thinkings about his people at home”

towhead noun
“paddled over to the towhead and hid in the cottonwoods”

tuck noun
“seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me”

weave verb
”the preacher…weaving first to one side of the platform and then the other”

wholesome adjective
“it wouldn’t be wholesome for you to go down there”

For a complete list of the more than 60 words illustrated with quotations from Mark Twain, choose the Unabridged as your reference, click on Advanced Search, type Twain in the Author Quoted box, then click on Search.