Vocabulary
Waiting In Line or On Line? New York's Quiet Giveaway
Almost all of the United States waits in line. New York City waits on line, and the Harvard Dialect Survey found the pattern thinning with distance from the city rather than stopping at a border. Britain, Ireland and most of the Commonwealth queue instead, which sidesteps the preposition entirely.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
You are waiting your turn behind other people. What are you doing?
Whichever comes out of your mouth without thinking.
- Waiting in line
- Waiting on line
- Waiting in the queue
- Queuing
- 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.