US dialect atlas
Trash Can or Garbage Can?
Trash can leads 35 states and garbage can 12, concentrated in the upper midwest and the northeast. A sizeable minority everywhere insists the two words mean different things.
- trash can leads 35 states
- garbage can leads 12 states
- no listed answer leads 4 states
Take the quiz and see which accent yours matches →
State by state
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.
| State | trash can | garbage can |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 42.3% ◀ | 29.1% |
| Alaska | 37% ◀ | 34.8% |
| Arizona | 41.7% ◀ | 27.2% |
| Arkansas | 56.1% ◀ | 13.6% |
| California | 40.7% ◀ | 18.8% |
| Colorado | 53.2% ◀ | 9.1% |
| Connecticut | 25.7% | 33.8% |
| Delaware | 52.3% ◀ | 13.6% |
| Florida | 37.1% ◀ | 29.3% |
| Georgia | 58.5% ◀ | 14.8% |
| Hawaii | 42.9% ◀ | 21.4% |
| Idaho | 26.7% | 47.3% ◀ |
| Illinois | 22.2% | 44% ◀ |
| Indiana | 50.4% ◀ | 15.3% |
| Iowa | 24.2% | 37.2% ◀ |
| Kansas | 66.7% ◀ | 5.9% |
| Kentucky | 40.4% ◀ | 31.7% |
| Louisiana | 38.9% ◀ | 29.1% |
| Maine | 41% ◀ | 17% |
| Maryland | 60.2% ◀ | 7.1% |
| Massachusetts | 42.9% ◀ | 11.1% |
| Michigan | 30.1% | 30.6% |
| Minnesota | 20.7% | 39.9% ◀ |
| Mississippi | 40.4% ◀ | 38.6% |
| Missouri | 65.6% ◀ | 6.5% |
| Montana | 11.7% | 62% ◀ |
| Nebraska | 44.1% ◀ | 20.8% |
| Nevada | 54.7% ◀ | 17.2% |
| New Hampshire | 40.9% ◀ | 16.4% |
| New Jersey | 27.7% | 41.2% ◀ |
| New Mexico | 56.6% ◀ | 11.5% |
| New York | 16.3% | 47.1% ◀ |
| North Carolina | 59.4% ◀ | 11.6% |
| North Dakota | 14% | 52.6% ◀ |
| Ohio | 40.4% ◀ | 25.7% |
| Oklahoma | 66% ◀ | 8.2% |
| Oregon | 22.6% | 35.5% |
| Pennsylvania | 42.4% ◀ | 20.8% |
| Rhode Island | 37.8% ◀ | 23.5% |
| South Carolina | 66.4% ◀ | 8.8% |
| South Dakota | 28.2% | 43.7% ◀ |
| Tennessee | 51.7% ◀ | 23.5% |
| Texas | 61.5% ◀ | 11.3% |
| Utah | 24.2% | 44.7% ◀ |
| Vermont | 31.6% ◀ | 31.6% |
| Virginia | 60.9% ◀ | 9.4% |
| Washington | 12.9% | 52.9% ◀ |
| Washington, D.C. | 42% ◀ | 17.3% |
| West Virginia | 47.5% ◀ | 27.5% |
| Wisconsin | 17.5% | 50.2% ◀ |
| Wyoming | 26.1% | 31.9% |
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.