Pacific Northwest slang: regional words, sayings, and how locals talk.
This page collects regional vocabulary from Pacific Northwest: 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 Pacific Northwest picture.
20 words
Mt. Rainier is visible from Seattle today.
Warm tropical atmospheric river from near Hawaii.
the sea or salt water
a self-important person of authority; a big shot
the drier inland region beyond the Cascade Range
A narrow weather band that often forms around Puget Sound.
The Pacific Northwest — Washington and Oregon — speaks a newer, quieter regional English, but it is regional all the same. Chinook Jargon, the old trade language, left words like "skookum" (strong, excellent) and "high muckamuck" (a self-important VIP). The outdoors shapes the rest: "spendy" for expensive, "the mountain is out" when Rainier is visible, "sun break" for a gap in the clouds, and a firm distinction between the coast and "east of the mountains." It is subtle next to Boston or the Deep South, but the vocabulary is unmistakably local.
Yes, though it is subtler than older regional dialects. Pacific Northwest English includes Chinook Jargon loanwords ("skookum", "muckamuck"), weather vocabulary ("sun break", "the mountain is out"), and terms like "spendy" for expensive.
"Skookum" means strong, sturdy, excellent, or impressive — "a skookum truck", "a skookum deal". It comes from Chinook Jargon, the historic Pacific Northwest trade language.
A "sun break" is a short period of sunshine breaking through an otherwise cloudy or rainy sky — a phrase common enough in the gray Pacific Northwest that local forecasts use it.
