When describing the outcome of a fall in the playground, 59% of people used the term grazed, particularly in the south of England. In the northeast of England, you’re just as likely to have scraped your knee as you are to have skinned it. Both of these terms seem to survive between generations.
If you fall over in the playground, your knee might be…
In Birmingham, the terms scraiged and scrazed are commonly used amongst older speakers, but are used less often by the younger generations. Meanwhile, further south, you’ll hear the term scrazed in both East and West Sussex, forming a unique enclave in an otherwise swamped sea of grazed knees!
Both skinned and grazed are more common among the workforce age group, while scraped is on the rise, indicating a potential change in how people describe this common childhood injury.
This bar graph animation shows how the use of these words has changed over time.
Interactive words map
Click this button to view the different responses to this question on a map.
You can tick the boxes on the side to select a word and show the places the word was used by the people who completed The Great Big Dialect Hunt. This map is based on where people grew up, not where they live now.
