Recipes & Lore • Translation Services

The Rhode Island Dictionary

Rhode Island English is real, it is proud, and it is not going to explain itself — that's our job. A living glossary for spouses, coworkers, and transplants of Rhode Islanders everywhere. Missing a word? Tell us; the dictionary grows.

The food terms (start here)

• Cabinet — a milkshake made with ice cream (elsewhere: a frappe). Named, the story goes, for where the blender lived. The coffee cabinet is the canonical form — recipe here.
• Coffee milk — cold milk + coffee syrup; the official state drink since 1993. Not iced coffee. Never iced coffee.
• Gagger (spelling contested) — a New York System hot wiener, all the way. Also acceptable: "wiener," never "hot dog" in this context.
• Quahog — the hard-shell clam; the state shell; the load-bearing mollusk of the entire regional diet. Full explainer.
• Stuffie — a stuffed quahog: chopped clam baked in seasoned bread stuffing, served in the shell it came in. Recipe and the chouriço story.
• Clam cake — a fried quahog fritter, not a patty. Recipe and Rocky Point lore.
• Jonnycake — cornmeal griddle cake; common Rhode Island spelling, though Kenyon's package says Johnny Cake. Choose your bay side carefully.
• Dynamite — Woonsocket's long-simmered, pepper-flake-spiked torpedo-roll sandwich. Predates the sloppy joe, thank you for asking.
• Pizza strip — a rectangle of thick, room-temperature, cheeseless tomato pizza from an Italian bakery, sold by the tray. Do not call it cold pizza. Recipe and the real history.
• Doughboy — fried dough, sugared, the size of a paperback. Carnival and clam-shack adjacent. Recipe and the Oakland Beach lore.
• Spinach pie — a folded bakery turnover of dough, garlicky spinach, and olives; a calzone anywhere else, but don't say that here. Recipe and the Wimpy Skippy story.
• Zeppola — the cream-filled St. Joseph's Day pastry (plural: zeppole) that owns every bakery counter each March. Recipe and the March 19 lore.
• Del's — frozen lemonade; by extension, summer itself. Squeeze the cup. No straw.

The general vocabulary

• Bubbler — a drinking fountain. The rest of the country is simply wrong about this.
• Wicked — intensifier. "Wicked good clam cakes." Shared with Massachusetts under an uneasy truce.
• Side by each — side by side; a gift of Woonsocket-area French-Canadian English.
• Down City — downtown Providence.
• "You know where [thing that closed in 1994] used to be?" — the standard unit of Rhode Island driving directions. Landmarks never die; they become navigation.
• "No suh!" / "Yes suh!" — disbelief and its confirmation, respectively.
• The Awful Awful — a legendary local milkshake trademarked by Newport Creamery ("Awful Big, Awful Good"). Mentioned here with respect; it belongs to them.
• Rhode Island distance math — anything over 20 minutes away requires an overnight bag. The state is 48 miles long; this is not about geography.