Indiana slang: regional words, sayings, and how locals talk.
This page collects regional vocabulary from Indiana: slang you'll hear in conversation, sayings that travel through families, and pronunciations that mark a person as a local. Pick a city to narrow the list, or keep "All cities" to see the full Indiana picture.
25 words
A pounded-thin breaded pork cutlet on a small bun.
Using 'anymore' to mean 'these days'.
Summer farm job pulling tassels off seed corn in the Corn Belt.
Indiana's unofficial state pie: cream, sugar, flour, vanilla, no eggs.
Northwest Indiana, especially Lake/Porter counties — the Chicago-adjacent industrial belt.
A thin, Mediterranean-spiced meat sauce ladled over spaghetti or hot dogs, ordered by 'ways'.
Indirect left turn made by going straight, U-turning, then turning right.
An affectionate nickname for Indianapolis, coined by Black jazz musicians in the 1920s by stressing a syllable of the city's name.
A communal meal where everyone brings a dish to share, the Indiana term for what most of the country calls a potluck.
A green bell pepper, an older Hoosier usage descended from when pickled peppers were called 'mangoed.'
A resident of the Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana, a label tied to the area's steel-mill heritage that locals have embraced.
A nickname for Indianapolis, referring to Monument Circle at the heart of the city's original 1821 plan.
The near-religious statewide fervor for basketball in Indiana, especially the high school tournament.
Local shorthand for the Indianapolis 500, the Memorial Day weekend auto race that anchors the city's calendar.
Indiana slang is the set of dialect words, regional sayings, and local pronunciations used in Indiana but not in standard American English. This page lists them with meanings, examples, and the type of each word.
Words and phrases associated with Indiana include supper, pop, ope, crick. Open any entry above to see its meaning, type, and where in Indiana it is used.
"supper" is listed on Dialectly as a regional word connected to Indiana. Each word page shows the full set of states and cities where it is recorded, plus a map.
Like every region, Indiana keeps vocabulary and pronunciations that mark a speaker as local. Standard American English levels these out; a regional dictionary like Dialectly records them before they fade.
