Vocabulary
Neutral Ground or Median? The Strip in the Middle of the Road
New Orleans calls the grassy strip between carriageways the neutral ground, a leftover of the city’s French and American sides. The rest of North America says median. Britain says central reservation.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call the strip of ground in the middle of a dual carriageway?
The bit that separates the two directions of traffic.
- Neutral ground
- Median / median strip
- Central reservation
- 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.
Central reservation
Expected in 3 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.