Spicket or spigot?

Question

I recently was making a list and for the first time using a digital device, typed in what I grew up referring to an outdoor faucet 'spicket' as into my iPad.

My mother grew up in Utah and my father in. Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. Mom's parents in Salt Lake and Central Utah while Dad's parents in Tennessee and the Western states.

I looked up how to spell spicket and for the first time in my 35 year teaching career found again that I have been mispronouncing and misspelling a word.

I am wondering which parts of the country use spigot and who says spicket?

Who knew?

lbf · Answer

spicket

Definition of spicket
  
  chiefly South & Midland [Middle USA] : spigot

(Merriam Webster)

Do you use "spigot" or "spicket" to refer to a faucet or tap that water comes out of?
  
  a. spicket (6.38%)
   b. spigot (66.89%)
   c. I use both interchangeably (2.52%)
   d. I say "spicket" but spell it "spigot" (12.64%)

(Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder. 2003. The Harvard Dialect Survey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department).

tchrist · Answer

In a comment, John Lawler wrote:

Just as /d/ and /t/ neutralize after a stressed vowel before an unstressed one (writer/rider, catty/caddy), so do /ɡ/ and /k/, and for the same reason -- vowels are voiced and tend to voice consonants between them, especially short consonants like voiceless stops. This means that it's very hard to hear the difference in that context, and therefore usually not worth making the effort to distinguish them in speech. It isn't, afaik, a geographic phenomenon, just a personal one, though it may be socioeconomic in some cases.

Steve Gazzo · Answer

https://pittsburghspeech.pitt.edu/PittsburghSpeech_PgheseOverview.html

Spicket is very common in the "Pittsburghese" dialect spoken in western pennsylvania, but it is clearly a corruption of "spigot".

Stephen Smith · Answer

In my 67 years growing up middle class in North Carolina, the word in question was commonly understood to be spelled spigot and pronounced spickit.

Spicket or spigot?

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