Scone: The Word That Divides the UK
In the UK and Ireland, people enjoy their scones with butter, jam and cream.
Scones, those delicious baked treats, taste good at any time of day — perhaps with a nice cup of tea.
However, not everyone can agree on whether you should put the jam on before the cream or the cream before the jam!
But this isn't the only thing people can't agree on when it comes to scones.
People can't even agree on how to pronounce the word!
In fact, some British and Irish people get quite passionate about the pronunciation of certain words — and "scone" is one of them.
There are two choices. You can rhyme it with "phone," with a long "o" sound. Or you can rhyme it with "gone."
In England, people who say it to rhyme with "phone" are sometimes thought to be posh. But across the sea in the south of Ireland, that's just the normal way to say it.
In 2016, researchers from the University of Cambridge even made a map of the UK and Ireland based on the way people pronounce the word.
They used data from an app that tens of thousands of people had downloaded.
They found that many people in Scotland and the north of England rhyme the word with "gone." But people in the southwest — and a small area of Yorkshire — rhyme it with "phone."
In the rest of the country, no one can really agree. It even divides families!
We do know one thing, though: scones taste great!
