Who says “Yes — “needs washed” is fine”?

Southern Appalachian English, Midland American English.

Who says “No — I would say “needs to be washed””?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English, Geordie / Tyneside English, Central Scottish English, Highland Scottish English, South Wales English, Northern Irish English, Cork English, East Irish English, New York City English, California English, Texas English, Boston / Eastern New England English, Chicago / Inland North English, Newfoundland English, Jamaican English / Patwa continuum, Bajan English, Queensland Australian English, New Zealand English, Toronto Canadian English, Johannesburg South African English, Delhi Indian English, Nigerian English, Kenyan English, Pakistani English, Philippine English, Singapore English, Hong Kong English, Melbourne / Southern Australian English, Ghanaian English, Trinidadian English, Malaysian English, African American English, Hawaiian English, Philadelphia English, New Orleans English, Vancouver / Western Canadian English, Perth / Western Australian English, Chennai / South Indian English, Liberian English, Sri Lankan English, Spanish-accented English, French-accented English, German-accented English, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Vocabulary

“The Car Needs Washed”: A Midland American Construction

In the American Midland — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri — and in Appalachia, “the car needs washed” is grammatical without “to be”. The construction is well documented and widely stigmatised, which is exactly why it survives as a regional marker rather than spreading.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Does “the car needs washed” sound normal — without “to be”?
Some American Midland and Appalachian speakers drop “to be” here. Most other English requires it.

Yes — “needs washed” is fine
No — I would say “needs to be washed”
Something else

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.

Yes — “needs washed” is fine

Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.

No — I would say “needs to be washed”

Expected in 57 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.