10 Hella Good U.S. Regionalisms
We’re on a word tour, going each and every place with a mic in our hand
Definition New England : tiny rod-shaped bits of usually chocolate-flavored candy often sprinkled on ice cream or pastries (such as doughnuts)
You may know these sundae (or frappe, or creemee) toppings as sprinkles, an intuitive nom-de-add-on if there ever was one. Jimmies is, shall we say, less intuitive, even if it’s on the tongue (literally and figuratively) of every kid and kid-at-heart at ice cream joints from P-town to Presque Isle. Ask for jimmies on your cone anywhere else, however, and you are bound to get some strange looks.
Once he took me to the zoo. In the monkey house we watched the apes and chimps. I rode on his shoulders, taller than everyone. He held my ankles so I wouldn’t fall and we bounced up and down making jungle noises. Later we ate hot dogs with mustard, and ice cream with rainbow jimmies.
— Natasha Friend, Scholastic Scope, March 2007
Definition South/Midland : a long knitted cone-shaped cap with a tassel or pom-pom worn especially for winter sports or play
You’re probably familiar with the word toboggan as it refers to a long, flat-bottomed light sled made usually of thin boards curved up at one end, but some folks in the Southern and Midland United States also use it for a stocking cap. The word comes to English from the Canadian French tobogan, itself from a word of Algonquian origin that shares an earlier ancestor with the Micmac word tobâgun, meaning “drag made of skin.”
“Distance running in cold weather is brutal, but I’ve seen Evan in toboggans and gloves out there,” added track coach Cole Freshour. “You can see his breath when he’s running, almost like a hard-breathing horse.”
— Jake Nichols, The Newport (Tennessee) Plain Talk, 16 May 2025
Definition Pittsburgh and environs : you guys, you all, y’all
Y’all know about yinz? If you enjoy reserving street parking spaces with chairs, eating sandwiches with French fries on them, and the colors black and yellow, the answer is maybe (who doesn’t love these things?). But Pittsburghers, or “Yinzers,” certainly do—they use yinz in addressing two or more persons or sometimes one person as representing also another or others.
… the most consequential vote you can make in this town, we think, is for Pittsburgh City Paper’s Best Of PGH Reader Poll winners. And boy oh boy, did yinz turn out. More than 25,000 of you, to be more precise, cast a staggering 321,269 votes up and down our ballot, creating a catalog of the abundant coolness permeating this city.
— Ali Trachta, Pittsburgh City Paper, 18 Sept. 2024
Definition Midwest/Great Plains : a side dish consisting of gelatin, whipped cream, fruit, mini marshmallows, and sometimes nuts.
This remarkable foodstuff goes by many names (and variable colors and ingredients) depending on where you live in the United States. As one of our editors, a native Midwesterner, reports: “I do believe the rest of the country calls it ambrosia salad. It is pink. Jello and whipped cream (usually) for the base, plus canned fruit cocktail, mini marshmallows, sometimes nuts. all mixed together. I have seen it with a graham cracker crust but we never made it that way. It is served as a side dish along with your meal, on your plate. Not as dessert. But Midwesterners literally call it ‘the pink stuff.’” To verify this, we did some perusing and it checks out, as the following quote from an Oklahoman kindergartner attests (just don’t follow their turkey recipe instructions, please, please, please):
Get a 25-pound turkey from the store. Take the turkey out of the plastic and add butter. Open the oven and put it in the oven on hot for 25 minutes. With the turkey, serve salad, ham, pie, rolls, the pink stuff, and tacos.
— The Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star, 23 Nov. 2024
Definition Michigan : a sliding glass door
One might imagine that a compound word such as doorwall, comprised as it is of two extremely common elements, would be in widespread use from sea to shining sea. One would be wrong in this case. Evidence of doorwall being used for sliding glass doors comes almost exclusively from Michigan, aka The Mitten State, The Wolverine State, Water-Winter Wonderland.
The main floor has a two-story living room with a gas fireplace, a kitchen with center island, a breakfast nook and pantry, a formal dining room and a first floor office. There is also a master bedroom with a tray ceiling, a gas fireplace and a doorwall to an outside patio.
— Sophia Lada, The News-Herald (Southgate, Michigan), 28 Jun. 2024
Definition Pacific Northwest : expensive
While spendy is gaining (cough) currency as a word to describe someone who tends or is inclined to spend, we currently define a single sense, used chiefly in the Northwestern United States, synonymous with expensive.
While individual bulbs can be spendy, the designer says the plants increase well and turn into large clumps over time, justifying the initial investment.
— Lorene Edwards Forkner, The Seattle Times, 26 Mar. 2025
Definition Chicagoland : a small, mild, yellow-green pepper that is pickled and used principally as a topping on a hot dog
Far be it from us to tell you how to festoon your frankfurter, but if you’re fixing to eat a wiener in Woodlawn or a sausage in Sauganash, locals may insist you include sport peppers amongst the fixings (and skip the ketchup).
Portillo’s is known for its Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches. The hot dogs are served on steamed poppy seed buns and topped with mustard, bright green relish, onions, tomato slices, a pickle spear, two sport peppers, and a sprinkling of celery salt.
— Susan Selasky, The Detroit Free Press, 12 May 2025
Definition : Western Pennsylvania : to set in order (usually used with up or out) or to make things tidy (usually used with up)
We initially aimed for all of the words in this article to represent a different part of the country, but yinz will forgive us for including a second western Pennsylvania term. The verb redd, used chiefly in the dialect in and around Pittsburgh, comes from Scots (specifically that used in the Northern Ireland province of Ulster) and is thought to be perhaps an alteration of ridden. Redd can take an object, usually with up or out (as in “redd out the drawers”) or not:
In Pittsburgh, at least, autumn weekends for many entail raking leaves or cleaning gutters. We also like to properly redd up so we can settle on the couch to watch the Steelers or Pitt Panthers take on that week’s opponent with a clear, uncluttered conscience.
— Gretchen McKay, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 13 Oct. 2025
Definition South : a sack of coarse material (such as burlap)
Okay, so maybe burlap sacks aren’t the most glamorous material objects in the world. But what if we called them croker sacks? Still no? Okay, we tried, but croker sack is an interesting and fairly unsung Southern regionalism. The word is an alteration of crocus sack or crocus bag, and first appeared in print in the late 1800s, with crocus referring not to the familiar spring-blooming flower, but to burlap, being the Jamaican word for that material.
We took off from the Georgia Power ramp at the dam. As I cruised up the lake at daybreak, running just on plane, my boat started making a terrible crunching sound. The noise was like a croker sack of jars thrown from a bridge hitting the pavement.
— Ronnie Garrison, The Griffin (Georgia) Daily News, 11 Jan. 2025
Definition Montana : a heavy sticky mud
The word gumbo is of Bantu origins, related to the Umbundu word ochinggômbo, meaning “okra.” In addition to sometimes being used synonymously with okra, gumbo most often refers to a soup thickened with okra pods or filé (the powdered young leaves of sassafras). The viscosity of gumbo has led the word gumbo to also take on the meaning in parts of the interior U.S., including Montana, of “a fine-grained silty soil that when wet becomes impervious and soapy or waxy and very sticky” and more broadly “a heavy sticky mud.”
Fergus County has roughly 1,500 miles of county roads. John Anderson, the county’s road and bridge supervisor, said some 75% of road use there is for recreation, while the rest is local farm and ranch operations. After the flood season subsides, the gumbo typically dries out in the end of August, just in time for antelope and bow hunting season to bring travelers out to the area, Anderson said.
— Seaborn Larson, The Independent Record (Helena, Montana), 18 Jun. 2023
