Vocabulary
“Not Home While Seven”: When “While” Means “Until”
In Yorkshire and parts of the north Midlands, “while” can mean “until” — “we'll not be home while seven”. Outside that area the sentence reads as nonsense or, worse, as its opposite. Level crossings in the region were once signed “do not cross while the light is flashing”, which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
“We’ll not be home while seven.” What does that sentence mean to you?
Answer on your first reading, not after puzzling it out.
- We’ll be home at seven — “while” means “until”
- We’ll be out during seven o’clock
- I know it means “until”, but I would never say it
- It does not make sense to me
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.
We’ll be home at seven — “while” means “until”
Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.
I know it means “until”, but I would never say it
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 five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.