Vocabulary
Ginnel, Gennel, Snicket or Entry? The Narrow Passage Between Houses
The sharpest lexical line in northern England runs through a single consonant: Sheffield says gennel and Leeds says ginnel, a few miles apart. Bradford prefers snicket, Liverpool says entry, the East Midlands says jitty, and most of the country just says alley without realising anything is being decided.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call the narrow passageway between or behind houses?
The kind you would cut through to reach the next street.
- Alley / alleyway
- Ginnel
- Gennel
- Snicket
- Entry
- Jitty
- Passage / passageway
- 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.
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.