English words you think are unique to your country/region.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

As a teenager I spent some years in eastern South Dakota where the word loptarded is used with some frequency. No one that I’ve run into outside of that region has ever heard it before.

In Florida, Baker Act has become a verb in common usage, as in “Someone take those pills away from her before she gets herself bakeracted,” or “Didja hear? Johnny’s parents bakeracted him after they found that gun.”

I say uff da at least once a day. More so on my particularly clumsy days or very cold or hot days.

My Floridian family members use a version of this that sounds like heyna without the “h” or ayna. When they use it, it can mean both “don’t you agree” and “I agree with you” (ex: saying ayna as a response to “wouldn’t it be nice to win the lottery?”).

We use those names here in NY too.

bold child = misbehaving child

We also have chipped ham, jumbo, gutchies and our city has both sides and ends.

Yinz kin git yer jumbo n islay’s chipped ham on da nor’side, da sa’side, in da wes’end or da eas’end, but only if yinz redd up your room, n’at. Yinz bin leavin yer gutchies all over fer da nebby neighbors ta see, n’at.

I can’t believe no one from the Bay Area has chimed in. That’s hella ridiculous!

duplicate post :frowning:

but because of pop culture* hella *is used elsewhere innit?

It gets quite a lot of usage in NZ too, although it also gets used for no aparent purpose.
‘How was the party?’
‘Aww, yea, nah, it was okay’

In NYC and environs we have the “Affirmative Negative,” which usually crops up when one person states an opinion to another, who wishes to express agreement. It consists of a largely meaningless “No,” followed by an affirmation of the opinion offered.

Person A: I think wind-up travel alarm clocks make way better paperweights than novelty salt and pepper shakers.
Person B: No, you’re absolutely right.

I’ve never heard this anywhere else, nor have I figured out where it could have come from that “no” turns out to mean “yes.”

I just did a quick impromptu survey of Australians. None of us have ever heard of the word ‘bubbler’ for drinking fountain. It might possibly be peculiar to parts of Australia but it doesn’t seem to be general if its used at all.

Winnipeg has ends too, and I think street directions are the same. In Montreal the street directions are definitely at the end, but of course we have interference from French so it’s hard to pin down.

As for Quebec English, obviously our biggest feature is lexical borrowing from French: both words (autoroute, terrasse, cinq à sept, vernissage) and constructions (close the lights). But there are other features: unlike the R.o.C., we tend to say “soft drink” instead of “pop,” for example.

I grew up hearing about bluegills and crappies, here in (sorta) northern Illinois. And my mother used ‘bubbler’ for drinking fountain, although I think she pretty much restricted that usage to the ones that actually bubble up, not the ones that shoot water into the air.

It’s not a single word, so maybe it doesn’t count, but Ohio and Pennsylvania seem to have it, and not anyone else. They say something needs washed, rather than needs washing. Not just that verb, but that’s the one I’ve heard most often.

I heard this one a lot growing up in rural northern Indiana. Another one was “of an evening” (or morning, afternoon, etc) for during the evening…e.g. “We usually sat on the porch of an evening, watching the world go by.”

Here in my adopted home of middle Tennessee, it’s the use of the verb carry.
“After I carried the kids to school today, I went back home for another cup of coffee” meaning that I enjoyed that expresso after I took the little *ankle biters * off to class.

However, it is not all Ohio. It is a pretty tightly focussed usage that runs from Pittsburgh through Youngstown to Canton. You occasionally hear it in Summit County (Akron), but the speaker nearly always turns out to have lived in Canton in their formative years. It is exceedingly rare in Cleveland (although it is slowly spreading).

I heard “of an evening” and carry in North and South Carolina. Also “tote” in place of carry.

In my corner of Kentucky, you actually don’t hear “y’all” used that much among the older folks whose accents developed independent of television. The more common second-person plural is “younz”, slurred so it’s almost like 1.5 syllables. It isn’t far from the Middle Atlantic’s “yinz”.

(For the second-person singular, like just about every Southerner I’ve ever known, we use “you”.)

I don’t know if it’s peculiar to my area, but I’ve noticed that “license” is more often that not treated as plural.

“No count” is a shortening of “no account” and is used to mean something isn’t any good. It’s usually the back end of a double negative, as in “Those tomatoes weren’t no count.”

It’s definitely a Westernism. It caught us by surprise when we moved to Winnipeg and, having left, we seem to have completely left it behind (except for the aforementioned manufacturer of fine gitch products).

I’ve heard verklempt as Yiddish meaning “uptight, irritated, alarmed,” etc.

As for “yeah, no,” a possibly related usage is “No, yes,” meaning “I agree with the negative statement you just made.”

Skive: meaning to avoid work or be just downright pig idle