Vocabulary
Takeaway or Takeout? Food You Collect and Eat Elsewhere
Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand say takeaway; most of the United States says takeout; Scotland and parts of the American Midwest say carry-out. In India, the usual word is parcel.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call restaurant food collected to eat elsewhere?
Choose the noun you would use: “Let’s get a …”.
- Takeaway
- Takeout
- Carry-out
- To-go
- Parcel
- 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.
Takeaway
Expected in 22 of the survey's accent profiles.
Takeout
Expected in 7 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.