A ginnel in Manchester, a snicket in Leeds, a twitten in Brighton, a jitty in Leicester, a chare in Newcastle, a wynd in Edinburgh. Britain argues happily about its words for an alley. I mapped every named alley in the UK to see which of those words actually made it onto the street signs.

Every few months someone online asks what you call the narrow path between two rows of houses, and the replies come in from all over: ginnel, snicket, twitten, twitchel, jitty, gitty, chare, wynd, close, vennel, pend, entry, loke, jigger, shut, ope, drang, tenfoot. It is one of the great dialect questions. But those answers are about speech. I wanted to know something different: when an alley has an official name, which word does the name use?

So I took every highway in OpenStreetMap in the UK whose name ends in one of these words, stitched the pieces of each alley together, threw out the false friends, and ended up with 3,382 named alleys. 1,795 of them use a regional word. The rest are plain alleys, passages and steps.

Scotland names its alleys, England mostly does not

The first surprise is how lopsided it is. In Scotland 94% of named alleys carry a regional word, nearly all of them wynd, close, vennel or pend. In England it is 28%. London has more named alleys than anywhere, 375 of them, and only 2 use a regional word. Everything else in the capital is a passage or an alley.

The wynd is the commonest word of all, with 957. But only 22% of wynds are actually footpaths. Most are roads on newer housing estates in Fife, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire: the old name for a narrow lane off the high street has become a developer’s favourite. The Scottish close went the other way. I only counted footpaths called Close in Scotland, because in England a Close is a cul-de-sac, and 85 of the 253 are in Edinburgh, mostly running down off the Royal Mile.

Every word stays at home

Where an English regional word does reach the sign, it sits tightly in its home ground. 29 of the 33 twittens are in Sussex. 98% of the 188 lokes are in Norfolk and Suffolk, with 17 around North Walsham alone. Every one of the 45 chares is in the North East, 15 of them in Newcastle where they climb up from the Quayside. 15 of the 32 opes are in Plymouth, and most of the rest are in Truro, Falmouth and on Portland. All 6 shuts are in Shropshire, three in Shrewsbury. The jitty is East Midlands through and through, with a little outpost in the Ironbridge Gorge.

375 named alleys in London, and only 2 of them use a regional word.

Ginnel or snicket?

Yorkshire’s great argument is between the ginnel and the snicket. On the street signs there are 14 ginnels and 10 snickets in Yorkshire. The ginnels are scattered around Leeds, Huddersfield, Harrogate and Skipton. 7 of the snickets are paths named simply Snicket around Burley in Wharfedale, about 9 km from the nearest ginnel at Yeadon. It looks like a neat dialect border, and it might be, but it is also a handful of paths that one parish or one keen mapper named. York, the home of the snickelway, has no alley named snicket at all.

The words that never reach the sign

The most interesting result might be what is missing. No alley in the data is named jigger, in Liverpool or anywhere else, although I searched for the word. There is a single tenfoot, near Hull. There is no gully in Birmingham. These are the words for the back alley behind a Victorian terrace, the strip where the bins go, and those alleys hardly ever got a name of their own. The words survive in speech, not on signs. The names that do survive belong to the old lanes of town centres, the chares and closes and opes, and to the street names that developers choose for a bit of local colour.

If you like this sort of thing, I have also mapped Britain’s street names and, for words people actually say, the barm, bap, cob or roll.

How I did this

The names come from OpenStreetMap, queried with QLever. A name counts for a word only if the word comes last, so Twitten Lane and Jetty Road do not count, but The Twitten and Ginnel No 7 do. OpenStreetMap often maps one alley in several pieces, so I joined pieces with the same name that sit within 150 metres of each other (a little further for roads). Then I read every alley with an ambiguous word. A jetty only counts as a jitty in the East Midlands, because everywhere else it is a pier. A cut only counts if it is a footpath, so The Cut in Southwark, a street, is out. Out went climbing gullies in the Lake District, mountain bike trails in Wales and Sherwood, cave passages under a Welsh mountain, Tarr Steps on Exmoor (a clapper bridge), racing pit lanes called Entry, an old aqueduct called the Greenock Cut and a Welsh field called Parc y Shut. In all 159 of 3,541 candidates went.

The caveats matter. Street names are official names, not speech, so this is a map of what reached the sign, not of what people say. Most alleys have no name at all. OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers, and some places are named far more thoroughly than others. Some of the rarer words rest on a handful of paths. So treat the big patterns as the finding and single dots as leads. And if your local ginnel has a name that I have missed, I would love to hear about it.

Notes and sources

• Alleys: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), queried with QLever. Towns: Wikidata (CC0). Counties: ONS boundaries (Open Government Licence v3.0).
• Dialect background: J. Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary (1898 to 1905); H. Orton and E. Dieth, Survey of English Dialects (1962 to 1971); C. Upton, S. Sanderson and J. Widdowson, Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England (1987); C. Upton, D. Parry and J. D. A. Widdowson, Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (1994); C. Upton and J. D. A. Widdowson, An Atlas of English Dialects (1996); the Dictionary of the Scots Language. These are background: the map is of street names, not compared with their maps.
• I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.