Rhyming with out leads 24 states and with hoot 13, and a large group says they use both interchangeably — often keeping the hoot vowel for Route 66 and the out vowel for the route to work.
rhymes with "out" leads 24 states
rhymes with "hoot" leads 13 states
no listed answer leads 14 states
Each square is one state, placed roughly where it sits on the map and coloured by the answer that leads there. Survey question: “route (as in, "the route from one place to another")”
Share of respondents in each state giving each answer. Percentages do not sum to 100: the survey offered answers this map does not name, and they are left out rather than folded into one of the three.
Does “Route” Rhyme With “Out” or “Hoot”? — Harvard Dialect Survey.
State
rhymes with "out"
rhymes with "hoot"
Alabama
33.2% ◀
23.8%
Alaska
25.5%
14.9%
Arizona
23.8%
23.2%
Arkansas
38.6% ◀
12.1%
California
18%
26.3%
Colorado
31.1% ◀
21.2%
Connecticut
3.3%
66.6% ◀
Delaware
4.2%
45.8% ◀
Florida
26.4%
30.4% ◀
Georgia
31%
18.1%
Hawaii
26.8% ◀
25%
Idaho
36.1% ◀
21.8%
Illinois
34.9% ◀
15.9%
Indiana
37.6% ◀
18.9%
Iowa
37.8% ◀
15.4%
Kansas
33.9% ◀
20.9%
Kentucky
34.6% ◀
18.3%
Louisiana
36.5% ◀
20.4%
Maine
2.8%
63.6% ◀
Maryland
8.7%
39.5% ◀
Massachusetts
2.9%
67.9% ◀
Michigan
28.5%
23.4%
Minnesota
40.2% ◀
14.2%
Mississippi
45.3% ◀
15.4%
Missouri
31.6% ◀
22.3%
Montana
45.7% ◀
16.8%
Nebraska
33.5%
15.6%
Nevada
19.4%
17.9%
New Hampshire
1.7%
60.7% ◀
New Jersey
5.9%
54.6% ◀
New Mexico
19.7%
22.2%
New York
7.1%
49.8% ◀
North Carolina
28.7% ◀
27.5%
North Dakota
45.3% ◀
11.1%
Ohio
34.7% ◀
20.1%
Oklahoma
24.7%
22.1%
Oregon
25.8%
17.6%
Pennsylvania
8.7%
47.8% ◀
Rhode Island
3%
66% ◀
South Carolina
34.5% ◀
20%
South Dakota
39.2% ◀
20.6%
Tennessee
32.7% ◀
21.1%
Texas
27.4%
21.5%
Utah
32.8%
12.9%
Vermont
5.3%
63.2% ◀
Virginia
20.1%
24.2%
Washington
35.1% ◀
15.1%
Washington, D.C.
14.1%
37.7% ◀
West Virginia
21.1%
24.4%
Wisconsin
40.4% ◀
18.2%
Wyoming
34.8% ◀
14.5%
Where this data comes from
The map above is drawn from the Harvard Dialect Survey, collected by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder in 2002–2003. It asked 122 questions and recorded, for each one, the share of respondents in every US state who gave each answer. It is a large self-selected sample rather than a census, and it is now two decades old — treat it as a well-supported picture of how people spoke then, not a measurement of today.
Data used under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence: attribution and share-alike, non-commercial. DialectGuessr’s own survey data is separate and is described on the about page.
