New England slang: regional words, sayings, and how locals talk.
This page collects regional vocabulary from New England: 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 New England picture.
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Maine: top-notch, the best quality.
Vermont: the muddy fifth season between winter and spring.
Maine: extremely busy, flat-out.
Maine: two cake rounds sandwiching marshmallow filling.
New England: a powerful coastal storm from the northeast.
Coastal cyclone hammering the Atlantic seaboard.
New England English — across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut — is famous for what it does to the letter r and for a vocabulary all its own. "Wicked" works as an intensifier ("wicked good"), a water fountain is a "bubbler", a milkshake is a "frappe", and a sandwich is a "grinder." The Boston and Rhode Island accents drop r's ("pahk the cah") and famously add them back elsewhere. Yankee plain-spokenness runs through the whole region's speech, from the coast of Maine to the Connecticut shoreline.
New England English is the regional speech of the six northeastern states. Its best-known traits are r-dropping (the "Boston accent"), "wicked" as an intensifier, and local vocabulary like "bubbler", "frappe", and "grinder".
In New England, "wicked" is an intensifier meaning "very" — "wicked good", "wicked cold", "wicked far". It carries no negative or evil sense in this use.
A "bubbler" is a drinking fountain. The word is used in eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island (and, separately, in Wisconsin) where most of the country says "water fountain".
