Maps of Colloquial Terms for Where You Park Your Car

[WTH is a "parkade"?]

If you leave the bubble of Minnesota, you quickly come to realize that not everyone calls a multi-story building where empty cars are parked by the same name. Sure, these grey concrete buildings are a ubiquitous part of our landscape. And yes, here in Minnesota, these things are called "parking ramps."

But not so elsewhere in these United States. In fact, much like the great "pop / soda / coke" divide or the Minnesotan "duck duck grey duck" exception, one quickly finds that the term "parking ramp" is rather unique to the Upper Midwest and that elsewhere in the United States people will park their cars on second stories in other kinds of buildings!

Let me break it down for you, using Google Trends maps.

The first key point is that the term "parking ramp" is a geographically specific regionalism...



Minnesota is the center of the "parking ramp", and once you leave the state, the term starts to disappear quickly.

Instead, by far the most common term for these buildings is "parking garage"...



All across the country, except in Minnesota, that 's the #1 name for these buildings.

But wait, there's more...

In the south, a multi-story building full of empty cars is often called a "parking deck"...




And in the west, such a building is repeatedly called a "parking structure"...




Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have a whole different term for such a building full of temporarily stored automobiles, particularly in the western provinces...



So there you have it. Parking decks. Parking ramps. Parking structures. Parking garages. Parkades. Sadly, a multiple-story place for empty cars might be one of the most distinctive parts of the North American linguistic vernacular.