Virginia slang: regional words, sayings, and how locals talk.
This page collects regional vocabulary from Virginia: 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 Virginia picture.
23 words
A spicy, coarse-ground half-pork, half-beef smoked sausage served chili-topped, native to D.C.
A western North Carolina loaf of pork liver, head meat, and cornmeal, sliced and fried.
DC-area shorthand for I-495, the highway ringing Washington.
A local shorthand for Richmond, Virginia, used as the city's branded identity and a marker of local pride.
A historic Richmond neighborhood of row houses, named for the way its streets fan outward from Belvidere Street.
Shockoe Slip, the old cobblestoned riverfront district named for the boat slips once used to load tobacco and flour for export.
Richmond's Boulevard Bridge over the James River, nicknamed for the five-cent toll it once charged.
A nickname for Richmond reflecting its location on the fall line of the James River.
Richmond's baseball stadium, home to the minor-league Richmond Flying Squirrels.
Carytown, Richmond's stretch of independent boutiques, shops and restaurants along Cary Street.
The Moorish Revival performing-arts venue (officially the Altria Theater) that locals still call the Mosque after its Shriner builders.
Virginia spans several dialects, from the Tidewater coast to the Appalachian southwest. Eastern Virginia's old Tidewater accent rounds "out" and "about" toward "oot" and "aboot", a feature called Canadian raising; the Piedmont and south lean Southern with "y'all" and "bless your heart"; and Northern Virginia ("NoVa") near D.C. speaks a more neutral, transplant-heavy English. Hampton Roads often goes by its area code, "the 757". A shopping cart is a "buggy", and "carry" can mean to give someone a ride.
Virginia slang varies by region: Southern terms like "y'all", "bless your heart", "buggy" (cart), and "carry" (to give a ride) in the south and Piedmont, the old Tidewater accent on the coast, and area-code identity like "the 757" in Hampton Roads.
The Tidewater accent of coastal eastern Virginia features "Canadian raising", which shifts the vowels in "out" and "about" toward "oot" and "aboot". It is one of America's older and increasingly rare regional accents.
In Virginia and much of the South, to "carry" someone means to give them a ride or take them somewhere — "I'll carry you to the store".
