DialectGuessr

Vocabulary

Candy, Sweets or Lollies? Your Word for Sugary Treats

North America says candy, Britain and Ireland say sweets, Australia and New Zealand say lollies, and Scotland often says sweeties. It is one of the cleanest national splits in the whole survey.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

What is your general word for small sugary treats?

Not cakes or desserts—the individually wrapped or bagged kind.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

Who says what

Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.

Candy

Expected in 20 of the survey's accent profiles.

Sweets

Expected in 34 of the survey's accent profiles.

Lollies

Expected in 4 of the survey's accent profiles.

Sweeties

Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.

Why this question is in the survey

Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.