Vocabulary
Robot or Traffic Light? The Signal at the Junction
South African English calls a traffic light a robot, and so do South African road signs — which is what makes it citable rather than folklore. The word dates from early signals that replaced human point-duty officers. North America says stoplight or traffic light; Britain, Ireland and Australasia say traffic lights.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call the red-amber-green signal at a junction?
The everyday word, not the official one.
- Traffic lights
- Stoplight
- Robot
- Traffic signal
- 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.