Vocabulary
Roundabout, Rotary or Traffic Circle? The Circular Junction
Most of the English-speaking world says roundabout. The United States is split: New England — Massachusetts especially — says rotary, while most other states say traffic circle or have adopted roundabout for the modern smaller design. The rotary line is one of the tightest regional words in American English.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a circular junction you drive around?
Traffic flows one way around a central island.
- Roundabout
- Traffic circle
- Rotary
- Circle
- 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.