Vocabulary
Water Fountain, Drinking Fountain or Bubbler?
Most of the English-speaking world says drinking fountain or water fountain. Two places famously say bubbler: eastern Wisconsin and the Boston area in the United States, plus large parts of Australia. It is one of the strongest small-area vocabulary markers anywhere.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a public fixture you drink water from?
The fixture sends a small stream of water upward.
- Drinking fountain
- Water fountain
- Bubbler
- Water bubbler
- Drinking tap
- 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.
Drinking fountain
Expected in 17 of the survey's accent profiles.
Water fountain
Expected in 12 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.