Vocabulary
Hoagie, Hero, Grinder or Sub? The Long Sandwich
The same long sandwich changes name every few hundred miles along the US East Coast. Philadelphia says hoagie, New York says hero, New England says grinder, and most of the rest of the country says sub. Britain and the rest of the world mostly have no special word for it.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a long sandwich in a split roll?
The filled baguette-shaped sandwich, not a toastie.
- Hoagie
- Hero
- Grinder
- Sub / submarine
- 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.
Sub / submarine
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.