UK regional names for alleyways
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Regional names for alleyways…
— Clare Downham (@downham.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 4:51 AM
Wikipedia has a Street suffix page, which lists 208 street words "recommended by the U.S. Postal Service" and 55 "suffix forms suitable for use in Australia with clear connotations of the class and type of road, recommended by Standards Australia", along with shorter lists for the UK, Canada and Hong Kong. There are a fair number of these that denote alleyway-like passsages, beyond the list of regional variants pictured above by Clare Downham.
The "See also" section of that page informs us that odonymy is a fancy word for "the study of street names".
The development of so many words for types of paths and roadways is an interesting example of how lexical evolution works. No doubt there are analogous lists in other languages.
Nathan Weston said,
March 24, 2026 @ 5:39 am
As a Northern Englishman (a Lancastrian), I would distinguish between 'alley' and 'ginnel'. The alley is the usually cobbled path behind a row of terraced houses; a 'ginnel' is a path between houses which leads from a road to an alley (or to another road). I come from mixed Lancashire/Yorkshire parentage, so for me 'snicket' is pretty much equivalent to 'ginnel'. Although I have in my head a vague memory that my parents would use 'snicket' when the path was covered overhead, and 'ginnel' for when it wasn't… or was it the other way round…?
ajay said,
March 24, 2026 @ 7:25 am
"Close" is also used across the country in "cathedral close", the walled and gated area around a cathedral, presumably because (compare Shropshire "shut") it is enclosed and shut up at night.
Confusingly "gate" in a street name in Scotland, as in the Cowgate in Edinburgh or the Gallowgate in Glasgow, does not mean a gate. It's a variant spelling of "gait" and means a road. The Cowgate is the gait that cows come in along, the Gallowgate is the gait that leads to the gallows.
The word for gate is "port" as in Edinburgh's West Port, which is of course nowhere near the sea.
Stephen Bowden said,
March 24, 2026 @ 7:25 am
In 1983 Mark Jones coined the word “snickelway” for the many such passages in the city of York. Individual cases might be suffixed Yard, Lane, Street or Gate (in the Norse-derived sense of a road), or not at all (as with The Shambles) so he decided a portmanteau of snicket, ginnel and alleyway was the most helpful way to talk about them.
Pedro said,
March 24, 2026 @ 9:04 am
Are these terms all on a comparable level? Wynd and Alley are used in the actual names of alleyways (e.g. Magpie Alley in London, or Lady Wynd in Edinburgh, and I think there's a street called simply Vennel nearby) but are Ginnel or Snicket used in this way? I think they're just generic terms for an alleyway; you might say "I'll wait at the bottom of the snicket" in Yorkshire but I don't think there are streets called Magpie Ginnel or Lady Snicket round there.
Similarly, I'm not sure "vennel" or "wynd" are used as generic terms; they just appear in street names. So this list seems to be confusing two different categories: dialect words meaning "alleyway" and street name suffixes associated with alleyways.
davep said,
March 24, 2026 @ 9:20 am
@Pedro: “Magpie Ally” (likely) has “ally” in the name to distinguish it from “Magpie Lane” (for example). I don’t think “ally” is more special than that. Just like “road”. The reason we see “ally” and “road” might be because those words are much more common than “snicker”, etc.
Rodger C said,
March 24, 2026 @ 9:33 am
Two questions:
(1) Is there an actual alleyway named (historically) Lemony Snicket?
(2) Why is odo- the English combining form (cf. odometer) derived from Greek hodos?
David L said,
March 24, 2026 @ 9:49 am
"Close" is commonly used throughout the UK in the names of short dead-end streets or cul-de-sacs. Maybe there's some subtle distinction in the Scottish use of the term that I'm not aware of.
A number of towns in and around Sussex have streets named "The Twitten" but I don't recall the name being used as a generic term for alleyways (I lived in the Brighton area for a number of years).
Pedro said,
March 24, 2026 @ 10:07 am
@davep: That's my point. "Alley" is a suffix that you'll see in street names, just like "Street" (e.g. Magpie Alley, Oxford Street). I'm not saying there's anything special about it. On the other hand, "snicket" is not a suffix you'll see on street signs but a generic term that people might use when discussing geographical features in general (e.g. "meet me at the top of the snicket" when the snicket in question might be Magpie Alley). These are two different categories.
Some of the words in the list of course appear in both categories, like "alley".
davep said,
March 24, 2026 @ 10:25 am
@Pedro: “ Are these terms all on a comparable level?”
And then you pointed out a possible reasons they might not be comparable.
@Pedro: “I'm not saying there's anything special about it.”
Here, you are saying they are comparable.
@Pedro: “ On the other hand, "snicket" is not a suffix you'll see on street signs…”
This is what I was trying to address. It could be because the other terms are much more common. It’s also possible that the need to distinguish the places is more recent (maybe, due to the rise of postal systems).
Pedro said,
March 24, 2026 @ 10:50 am
@davep: Yes, some of the terms may be more common, but that's fine. I never said they were all comparable (although of course I acknowledged that some of them are comparable).
My point is that, when the meme claims that different parts of the UK have different words for "alleyway", you expect that comparison to be on a consistent basis. For example it could mean:
(1) People in different towns use different words when discussing alleyways; or
(2) Street names for alleyways in different towns carry different suffixes
But on closer inspection it turns out that neither meaning is consistent with the list of terms given. Interpretation 1 (which I'd say is broadly true and also rather interesting) holds for "snicket" and "ginnel" but not for "wynd" because nobody in Scotland ever calls an alleyway a "wynd". Interpretation 2 (which is probably also true to some extent) holds for "Wynd" but not for "Snicket" because alleyways in Yorkshire don't have names like "Whippet's Snicket".
I suspect that Interpretation 1 is the intended one but the list that came out of that was a bit disappointing so the memer felt they had to pad it out with suffixes.
Philip Taylor said,
March 24, 2026 @ 11:02 am
David L. —
In Tunbridge Wells (just across the border into Kent from Sussex), "twitten" is indeed "used as a generic term for alleyways" — living at 100 Summervale Road, my window cleaner lived "just up the twitten" (opposite) "and round the corner".
davep said,
March 24, 2026 @ 11:09 am
@Pedro: "1) People in different towns use different words when discussing alleyways; or"
The other terms are somewhat archaic, very regional, and kind of obscure. "Ally" (like "road") isn't. It's not clear how common the usage of the terms are in their region. (Maybe, it's something like "murder of crows" that no one really uses in real life.)
(None of the obscure words made it to the US.)
@Pedro: " because alleyways in Yorkshire don't have names like "Whippet's Snicket"."
"Magpie Alley" might not always have had "Alley" in the name. Maybe, residences don't often have main entries on "snickets".
(Supposedly, one can be loose about mailing addresses. The post can manage to get stuff delivered even with vague addresses. By "Alley" in the name might be more modern.)
Coby said,
March 24, 2026 @ 11:33 am
Ian Rankin's novel Fleshmarket Close (2004), the name of an actual street in Edinburgh, was published in the US as Fleshmarket Alley. This is an example of a practice, once rampant among American publishers, of Americanizing the language of British novels.
Similarly, Tana French's Broken Harbour was Americanized to Broken Harbor, even though it's the name of a {fictional) town in Ireland.
Kate Bunting said,
March 24, 2026 @ 12:52 pm
'Gate' in street names is by no means limited to Scotland; it's found in large parts of northern and eastern England (the former 'Danelaw') including Derby and Nottingham here in the Midlands.
There's a Paine's Twitten in Lewes, Sussex, named after Thomas Paine who once lived there. But I don't know of any instances of 'Something Jitty', our local Derbyshire term.
pchippy said,
March 24, 2026 @ 2:16 pm
A possibly-relevant usage of 'snicket' outside the north: Just outside the village of Turkdean in Gloucestershire, there's a cottage named 'The Snicket'–it's located by the side of a footpath that serves as a shortcut up the hill toward the village. Not exactly an alleyway, but a cut-through anyway.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
March 24, 2026 @ 3:46 pm
Because of Danish gade and Swedish gata 'street'.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
March 24, 2026 @ 3:47 pm
And of course Austrian gasse.
CuConnacht said,
March 24, 2026 @ 4:21 pm
There are streets called gates in York. The gates in the city walls are called bars.
Gate/gade/gata is Scandinavian for street.
mollymooly said,
March 24, 2026 @ 7:04 pm
In Ireland, it is common for all the streets in a housing development (what Americans call a subdivision) to have the same first word and different street-types, as "Foo Street", "Foo Road", "Foo Avenue", etc. The most street-types I've counted in one development is 25: when the grounds of Glencairn House south of Dublin were sold for housing, the developer ended up with Glencairn Avenue, Glencairn Chase, Glencairn Close, and so on via Copse, Court, Crescent, Dale, Drive, Garth, Glade, Glen, Green, Grove, Heath, Heights, Lawn, Oaks, Park, Place, Rise, Road, Thicket, View, Walk, to Glencairn Way. Yes, there is a "Glencairn Glen" in there.
Michael Watts said,
March 24, 2026 @ 8:31 pm
So what happened with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? The American publisher changed it to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, but that can't be seen as "Americanizing" it – the American English term for the philosopher's stone is "the philosopher's stone". The publisher replaced that already-extant term with random nonsense.
(The American versions also display actual Americanization; I think "snog" has been translated in at least the earlier novels. That strikes me as much less weird.)
Bob Ladd said,
March 25, 2026 @ 1:01 am
I'm pretty sure the American publisher decided that anything with "philosopher" in the title of a book aimed at kids wouldn't sell. (And that most potential readers wouldn't have a clue what the Philosopher's Stone was.) It's hard to remember a time when Harry Potter was completely unknown, but that was the situation when the first book appeared.
For that matter, the same market calculations also determined the author's decision to go by J K Rowling rather than Joanne Rowling.
ajay said,
March 25, 2026 @ 4:36 am
Interpretation 1 (which I'd say is broadly true and also rather interesting) holds for "snicket" and "ginnel" but not for "wynd" because nobody in Scotland ever calls an alleyway a "wynd".
Not often, but I have found some on Google Books – most referring to a street that actually has "Wynd" in its name, but still talking about it as "the wynd" as a generic lower case noun. None more recent than 1900, though, and I can't find anyone talking about a wynd that isn't actually called "Something Wynd" in the way that you might call Jones Avenue "the street".
I don't know of any instances of 'Something Jitty', our local Derbyshire term.
There are apparently several in Broseley – see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gough%27s_Jitty,_Broseley_1.jpg
Kate Bunting said,
March 25, 2026 @ 12:11 pm
Cu Connacht said:
Gate/gade/gata is Scandinavian for street.
Exactly – hence my reference to the Danelaw. I had forgotten that the poster who originally mentioned the Scottish usage had not spelled out the Scandinavian origin.
Ed Rorie said,
March 25, 2026 @ 12:26 pm
In Kilkenny there are narrow alleyways called slips; Butter Slip is the most famous. Someone who lived there told me is the origin of the phrase “give someone the slip”— supposedly derived from the act of ducking into one of these passages to avoid capture. Like me, however, this individual was an American, so it’s possible that a local comedian had been pulling his leg—Google doesn't mention the connection.
Trogluddite said,
March 25, 2026 @ 1:08 pm
Here in West Yorkshire, "ginnel" almost always refers to a pedestrian tunnel through a terrace of back-to-back dwellings, providing access to one or more of the "back" dwellings and possibly to a shared yard (and/or shared outdoor toilets originally). A "snicket" could be just about any urban pedestrian path that doesn't follow the course of a street or road.
The nominally "back" terrace of a row of back-to-backs might abut the rear of neighbouring properties, have a simple alleyway to allow waste collection, or have its own full-fledged street ("X Street"/"Back X Street" pairs are common).
Barbara Phillips Long said,
March 25, 2026 @ 1:35 pm
Relatively recent generic use of "wynd" and "close" in a novel with scenes set in Edinburgh:
"Crossing High Street, he plunged into the warren of closes and wynds, ducked through passages and alleys so narrow he had to turn sideways to pass through."
— In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster, by Stephanie Laurens; Avon Books; copyright 2011
For those with an interest in London-area street names, there is Mapping London: Making Sense of the City, by Simon Foxell; Black Dog Publishing; copyright 2007. The generic "passages" appears in the introduction in a quote:
The cartographers of London have made sense of the city in ways that compare with writers, such as William Chaucer through to Martin Amis, who have animated London with their characters and narratives: "There was a time when I thought I could read the streets of London. I thought I could peer into the ramps and passages, into the smoky dispositions, and make some sense of things. But now I don't think I can. Either I'm losing it, or the streets are getting harder to read. Or both."
The quote is from "London Fields," by Martin Amis.
Viseguy said,
March 25, 2026 @ 3:57 pm
Am I right that close, in this context, rhymes with dose, not with doze?
(Here in New York City, we have circles, courts, coves, crossings, drives, lanes, loops, places, terraces, transverses, underpasses, ways, and at least one trail, but no closes as far as I'm aware.)
Philip Taylor said,
March 26, 2026 @ 4:20 am
It certainly does for me, VG, but of course I can't speak for all Britons …
ajay said,
March 26, 2026 @ 4:39 am
Am I right that close, in this context, rhymes with dose, not with doze?
Yes – it's close as in "not far away".
Relatively recent generic use of "wynd" and "close" in a novel with scenes set in Edinburgh
Ah, thanks! I searched for "wynd" but I didn't think to search for "wynds".
David Marjanović said,
March 26, 2026 @ 10:33 am
That's generic German Gasse "small street" and specifically Viennese -gasse, the default suffix for the names of streets of any size in Vienna and only there.
Me, I'd call all 14 pictures Straße…
Philip Taylor said,
March 26, 2026 @ 10:51 am
Well, Baden-Württemberg has a Gelbinger Gasse, David, so perhaps not only Wien …
ajay said,
March 26, 2026 @ 11:16 am
close, in this context, rhymes with dose
As a noun, I would pronounce "dose" with a soft s to rhyme with "close/not far away", but as a verb I would pronounce it as "doze"…
Philip Taylor said,
March 26, 2026 @ 1:47 pm
But presumably not when its meaning is "to add or apply a dose of something" [OED: "dose", vb; sense 1] and therefore only when its meaning is "to sleep drowsily, to fall into a …". [ibid, sense 3].
Viseguy said,
March 26, 2026 @ 5:09 pm
Thank you, PT, that's close enough for me.
That's interesting, ajay. I've never heard dose pronounced like doze, nor, PT, have I ever seen the former used an alternate form of the latter, though I see now that the OED dates that usage to 1617.
Michael Watts said,
March 27, 2026 @ 4:06 am
What is a "soft s"? In English the only soft/hard letter terminology is that "c" may be soft (/s/) or hard (/k/), and so may "g" (/dʒ/, /g/).
I agree with the comments above me that it isn't possible to pronounce "dose" with /z/.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
March 27, 2026 @ 5:43 pm
Today when I was driving I passed a sign for "Hedge Row Lane." I know Philadelphia has plenty of row houses. Are there thoroughfares/streets/alleys whose names end in "row"? It seems unlikely to me that "row" would be used generically for roads, but "row" does occur as part of "skid row," for instance.
John Tayleur said,
March 27, 2026 @ 11:10 pm
I live in Alderney in the Channel Islands, where 'venelle' (obviuosly related to 'vennel' and 'ginnel') is the name for an alley connecting two streets. I haven't come across it in the other Channel Islands. It is a Norman-French word and can be found in Normandy and, I believe, in some other parts of France.
Philip Taylor said,
March 28, 2026 @ 5:28 am
"Rotten Row", London.
Kate Bunting said,
March 28, 2026 @ 9:44 am
The fictitious 'Catfish Row' (Porgy & Bess) and 'Cannery Row' (which apparently started as a nickname, but was later made official).
In England, '[Something] Close' is a common street name for a residential cul-de-sac.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
March 29, 2026 @ 12:52 pm
On dose, I'll do a Philip Taylor: JC Wells has dəʊs §dəʊz, so it seems to be an attested dialectal form.
On -gasse — @ David is of course right, I seem to have lost the hyphen but I did lowecase it, in my defence ;P
Philip Taylor said,
March 30, 2026 @ 5:56 am
Intrigued to know where you find the gloss for "§", Jarek. I cannot find a gloss in the electronic LPD, and the printed version uses a "†" for the same purpose, which it glosses as follows :
Philip Taylor said,
March 30, 2026 @ 6:07 am
Ah, found it (in the LPD CD-ROM Help section) — § BrE non-RP (see p.xix). I can't find it on p.xix of my printed version, but John may well have been referring to a different edition.
ajay said,
March 30, 2026 @ 6:37 am
What is a "soft s"? In English the only soft/hard letter terminology is that "c" may be soft (/s/) or hard (/k/), and so may "g" (/dʒ/, /g/).
Michael, it is perfectly clear from my comment what I meant. You seem to make a career out of popping up in the comments here and asking boneheadedly stupid questions and I wish you would stop.
ajay said,
March 30, 2026 @ 6:50 am
Today when I was driving I passed a sign for "Hedge Row Lane." I know Philadelphia has plenty of row houses. Are there thoroughfares/streets/alleys whose names end in "row"?
There are plenty in the UK – Rotten Row, already mentioned, is a riding path in Hyde Park in London, but there are several that are actual thoroughfares with buildings, open to vehicle traffic etc. Paternoster Row and Canon Row in London, Henderson Row and Inverleith Row in Edinburgh. Philadelphia has a Boathouse Row and a Sugdens Row, apparently https://geographic.org/streetview/usa/pa/philadelphia.html
But presumably not when its meaning is "to add or apply a dose of something" [OED: "dose", vb; sense 1] and therefore only when its meaning is "to sleep drowsily, to fall into a …". [ibid, sense 3].
Yes, even then. I would pronounce "an effective dose of antibiotics" as "dose" with an S, but "he was dosed with painkillers" as "dozed".
Is that so odd? The S in similar words – closed, nose, hose etc – is pronounced as Z. Even glucose, viscose etc are pronounced with a Z in some variants of English.
Philip Taylor said,
March 30, 2026 @ 12:21 pm
Well, certainly odd to me, Ajay. "he was dosed with painkillers" requires (IMHO) what you and I would term a "soft s'"'. As to "Even glucose, viscose etc are pronounced with a Z in some variants of English" — may I ask in which variant(s) they are not so pronounced ?
ajay said,
March 31, 2026 @ 5:26 am
"As to "Even glucose, viscose etc are pronounced with a Z in some variants of English" — may I ask in which variant(s) they are not so pronounced ?"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/glucose
says that the UK pronunciation is "glucoze" and the US pronunciation is "glucose", which sounds right to me.
Michael Watts said,
March 31, 2026 @ 6:43 am
Yes. This means you have [z] as an allophonic variant of /s/, which is not something I would view as normal.
(I guess it could mean that for you the verb dose is irregular, with a third-person-singular form that is not derived from the base form. That would be odd too. This would be my analysis of the verb have to denoting obligation, as in "I have to go now" – there is a disconnect between the form having to, pronounced with /v/, and the other forms (infinitive have to with /f/, finite have to with /f/) because the verb is irregular and those are just the forms it has. But there's quite the gap in frequency between the verbs have to and dose.)
How do you pronounce other verbs with a different vowel, like missed, passed, faced, or guessed? What about nouns like mist, past, paste, or guest?
This doesn't really seem to help explain either half of your self-description. I agree that "nose" and "hose" are orthographically similar to "dose", but you maintain a difference in pronunciation, so there's nothing for the similarity to explain. I don't agree that "closed" is similar to "dosed" – the reason that "closed" is pronounced with /zd/ is that "close" is pronounced with /z/. Similarly, the reason that "dosed" is pronounced with /st/ is that "dose" is pronounced with /s/.
It was clear from your comment that a "soft s" referred to /s/. It wasn't clear how that distinguished it from any other "s", what other types of "s" might exist, what quality of /s/ is being described as "soft", or, in a fairly modest leap of interpretation, what a "hard s" might refer to. In particular, "hard c" and "hard g" refer to the fundamental pronunciations of those letters, but that can't be true for "hard s" if "soft s" refers to /s/!
By analogy to "c" and "g", the obvious candidate for a "soft" s would be e.g. the "s" in "mission". What do you call those?
I can confirm that "glucose" is pronounced with /s/ in American English. /z/ would definitely raise eyebrows. I can't really provide an opinion on "viscose", a word I was completely unfamiliar with. But I would have assumed that it ended in /-oʊs/.
More generally on the topic, I have vaguely felt for a while that there is a preference for intervocalic fricatives to be voiced, even though a robust phonemic distinction is maintained between intervocalic voiced fricatives and intervocalic voiceless ones. I find the feeling interesting but don't have much useful to say about it. It's hard to apply it to "dose" / "dosed", or similar words, because the "s" there isn't intervocalic.
Annabel Smyth said,
March 31, 2026 @ 10:45 am
Someone said: "A number of towns in and around Sussex have streets named "The Twitten" but I don't recall the name being used as a generic term for alleyways (I lived in the Brighton area for a number of years)."
It is definitely the generic word in my part of Sussex (between Worthing and Arundel).
ktschwarz said,
March 31, 2026 @ 11:48 pm
The Cambridge Dictionary, at ajay's link, is inconsistent: their UK "glucose" has /z/ in the audio clip, but /s/ in IPA transcription. And their pronunciations of sucrose, fructose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, cellulose, and viscose are unpredictable — I thought they'd all rhyme, at least within a country, but apparently not!
"glucose" with /s/ is the only way I've ever heard it in the US, and the only pronunciation in the American Heritage Dictionary, but Merriam-Webster includes both, and Oxford includes both for both UK and US pronunciations. (Print editions of the OED gave only /s/.)
ajay said,
April 1, 2026 @ 3:32 am
And their pronunciations of sucrose, fructose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, cellulose, and viscose are unpredictable — I thought they'd all rhyme, at least within a country, but apparently not!
Fascinating! I would say they do all rhyme (all use "-oze") with each other, and also with hose, nose, rose, oppose, rugose, and so on.
I am sitting here at my desk experimentally muttering the names of various carbohydrates to myself and intermittently feeling very grateful that there isn't anyone else in my office because they would think I had lost my grip.
ajay said,
April 1, 2026 @ 3:34 am
What about other biochemical names? I appreciate these are less common in everyday use, but would you rhyme protease, amylase, lipase, catalase and so on with "gaze" or with "face"?
Philip Taylor said,
April 1, 2026 @ 3:52 am
All /z/s for me, Ajay, but then as a fellow Briton you would almost certainly expect that.
Philip Taylor said,
April 1, 2026 @ 3:57 am
"(Print editions of the OED g[i]ve only /s/.)" — Well I'm d@mned. So they do (well, the 2nd [1933] edition, at least). I am absolutely gobsmacked.
Michael Watts said,
April 1, 2026 @ 11:37 pm
I have no strong opinion on that; I'd believe either way.
Chas Belov said,
April 11, 2026 @ 11:49 pm
This American has only previously been aware of Alley and Close. And I only became aware of Close from a street sign in the UK-shot music video for To Samo by Czech group Jananas where at 10 seconds we see a sign for Clerkenwell Close. Investigation in Google Maps shows Clerkenwell Close as being in London. Not only is it not a cul-de-sac, it appears to bifurcate.