As part of the Linguistics Roadshow, we put together a short survey on some Australian English vocabulary. We invited people to fill it in and tell us which words they prefer for particular things, like potato cakes/scallops/fritters. The responses are fed directly into a map, so that we can see if there are any interesting differences depending on where people come from (and of course there are!).

If you have not already filled out the survey, feel free to do it here: bit.ly/AusWords

These results are brought to you by the 2015 Linguistics Roadshow team: Katie Jepson, Jill Vaughan and Rosey Billington. If you need to cite one or more of these maps, please use the reference details at the bottom of this page.

Here are some maps showing responses (more than 28,000!) for each of the items in the survey.

What do you call a battered, deep-fried potato snack?

 

What general term do you use to refer to swimwear?

 

What do you call the object that you might drink water from in a park or school?

 

What do you call a barbecued sausage, served in a single slice of bread?

 

Which term do you use when someone’s nose is bleeding?

 

What do you call the place where you might buy lunch at school?

 

Does the word ‘dance’ rhyme with ‘pants’, or ‘aunts’?

 

What do you call the small local shop that sells newspapers, lollies, drinks and basic groceries?

 

What do you call a frozen, water-based sweet treat?

 

Which of these would you use to describe kissing someone?

 

What is your most common way of expressing laughter when chatting online, or in texts?

 

What is your preferred way of describing a thing or situation that is pretty good?

Summary stats

When we first uploaded these maps, we had a couple of thousand responses, but now there are over 28,000 responses to the survey, from all across the country!

If you would like to see a breakdown of how many people chose each variant, check out the summary pie charts.

There are more responses from people aged 25-34 than other age groups, as well as more responses from women (these graphics based on responses up to May 2026).

 

 

Thanks to the many enthusiastic people who contributed their answers for us to map!

 

Here is a suggested way to reference this page and any of the maps on it:

Jepson, Kathleen, Billington, Rosey, and Vaughan, Jill. (2026). Mapping words around Australia. Retrieved from bit.ly/AusWordsMaps

 

If you are using a map image based on our earlier interactive maps (we thank Lauren Gawne of superlinguo for her assistance in producing these!), please use this reference instead:

Billington, Rosey, Gawne, Lauren, Jepson, Kathleen and Vaughan, Jill. (2015). Mapping words around Australia. Retrieved from bit.ly/AusWordsMaps

 

‘Mapping words around Australia’ by Kathleen Jepson, Rosey Billington and Jill Vaughan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.