Vocabulary
Corner Shop, Convenience Store, Dairy or Milk Bar?
Britain and Ireland say corner shop, North America says convenience store or corner store, New Zealand says dairy, and parts of Australia say milk bar. New York adds bodega, and parts of the American Northeast use deli for the same thing.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a small neighbourhood shop selling everyday items?
Imagine somewhere smaller than a supermarket and open fairly late.
- Corner shop
- Convenience store
- Corner store
- Dairy
- Milk bar
- Deli
- Something else
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.
Corner shop
Expected in 20 of the survey's accent profiles.
Convenience store
Expected in 8 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 five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.