New York slang: regional words, sayings, and how locals talk.
This page collects regional vocabulary from New York: 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 York picture.
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Coffee with milk and sugar (in NYC delis).
A Rochester pile-up of meat, beans, mac salad, fries, and hot sauce.
Derogatory term for outer-borough and suburban people who come into Manhattan.
A cheese pizza slice sold for $1 at high-volume NYC pizzerias.
New York English, and the New York City accent in particular, is one of the most imitated in the world. The classic city sound drops the r ("cawfee", "fuhgeddaboudit"), and the vocabulary is just as recognizable: "stoop" for the front steps, "on line" instead of "in line", a "hero" for a long sandwich, "bodega" for the corner store, and "schlep", "schmuck", and other Yiddish borrowings that went national from here. Upstate New York speaks differently again, closer to the Inland North, with its own vowel shifts.
New York City slang includes "stoop" (front steps), "bodega" (corner store), "hero" (a long sandwich), waiting "on line" rather than "in line", "brick" (very cold), and many Yiddish loanwords like "schlep" and "schmuck" that spread nationwide from NYC.
Spelled-out from the New York pronunciation of "forget about it", it can mean "don't mention it", "no way", or "it's so good there's nothing more to say" — tone and context decide.
In New York City, people wait "on line" where the rest of the country waits "in line". It is one of the most reliable regional tells of NYC-area speech.
