A Regional Spelling Of “Diner” As “Dinor”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is McPaul calling from Montclair, New Jersey.

McPaul, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Thank you. I wanted to talk about a strange, unique, regional spelling variation that I was conscious of.

I wasn’t conscious of it until I left the region where I grew up.

I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in Erie, there are about a half a dozen restaurants that are called – they have the word diner in their name, you know, Stan’s Diner or the Park Place Diner or whatever.

But they are all – all the diners in Erie are spelled D-I-N-O-R on their signs.

So, you know, growing up, I just assumed that was how diner was spelled until I went to college in Pittsburgh and saw a diner where it was spelled D-I-N-E-R.

And I pointed at the sign. I said to my friends, they spelled diner wrong on that sign.

And they all sort of thought, you know, it was a classic look at me like I had two heads moment.

And then, you know, that was the moment that I found out that only in Erie a diner is spelled D-I-N-O-R.

So I’m curious about whether you’ve ever come across that odd variation,

And also just more generally about colloquial alternative spellings for commercial businesses in particular regions.

Well, our other listeners have noticed that we’ve heard from Robert White in Ohio and Alan Perkins in Vermont.

They noticed that diner was spelled that way in the northwest of Pennsylvania and wanted to know more, too.

And so it’s primarily around Erie and the surrounding cities and not much else.

There’s nowhere else, really.

Occasionally, you’ll find it a little further away.

But as far back as the 1920s, you can find listings in, say, business directories or ads in the newspapers for diners, spelled O-R, in that part of the country.

Nobody knows for sure why it’s the case, but looking for an answer, I turned in the past to Brian Butko’s book, that’s B-U-T-K-O, Diners of Pennsylvania.

And it’s a really wonderful book.

I mean, it’s so full of history.

It’s just a real nice picture of a time and a place in this country.

And as you know, diners were often made out of dining cars, but there was also this side industry of making diners prefabricated, I think in Patterson, New Jersey, and shipping them to other places in the country.

So they were made to order to look like dining cars and not necessarily from dining cars originally.

And so some of these diners with an OR at the end in the northwest of Pennsylvania are these prefabricated diners.

He lists a bunch of different theories.

One theory is that people were saying to themselves, well, you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t have the person who eats there be known as a diner and the building known as a diner.

So we should call the building something a little different.

So let’s call it diner OR.

Another theory was that it was just a misspelling that caught on, though nobody really knows who spelled it that way first.

Another idea was that, and this is the one I think has the most legs to it, so to speak, is that it was, Martha, there’s a term for this where these businesses misspell language on purpose.

Sensational spelling.

Yes, that’s it. Sensational spelling.

Oh, sure.

Where they use these spelling variants just to kind of catch your eye.

Like, quick becomes K-W-I-K, or the through in drive-through comes T-H-R-U, or night.

Right, or light B or L-I-T-E.

Yeah, exactly. Night becomes an I-T-E as well.

There’s a theory that it comes from German, but there’s no German word that’s like that, that means anything like diner.

But in any case, so the one that I like the best is that it really is just a kind of a commercial business spelling variant that caught on.

Thanks for raising that question.

Thank you. Bye.

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