DialectGuessr

Vocabulary

Shopping Cart, Trolley or Buggy? What You Push Round the Supermarket

The Commonwealth says trolley and the United States says shopping cart, but the American South has its own answer: buggy. New England contributes carriage, and parts of the upper Midwest say wagon.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

What do you call the wheeled basket used in a supermarket?

Choose the word you would use when asking where to find one.

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.

Shopping cart

Expected in 19 of the survey's accent profiles.

Trolley

Expected in 40 of the survey's accent profiles.

Buggy

Expected in 1 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 two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.