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What do you call the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street?

Wow. Good question.
I don't. It's never come up.
I would probably call it the median first, then shake my head and run through a number of alternatives, in this order:
buffer?
greenspace?
I give up. It's just grass.

In Chicago, it's called the "parkway". I can't remember for certain what I used to call it in growing up in St Louis; I think it was the "verge".

[FYI: There's a previous thread for asking about dialectal lexical variations here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38548&hilit=call.]

Did you also read the New Yorker this week?

(The grassy strip, by the way).

Uhh... "that grassy area between the sidewalk and the street"?

I though about "berm," but that doesn't really fit.

"The Patch of Grass between the Sidewalk and the Road" — it's quite the Phrasal Noun.

Verge, maybe. We don't tend to have this kind of border zone in the UK, or indeed Japan. I've seen signs saying "grassy verge" but that tends to be to point out that there's no kerb.

Where I come from people tend to use the word "boulevard" for this. I assume it's related to the median strip that can be found on proper boulevards.

finlay wrote:Verge, maybe. We don't tend to have this kind of border zone in the UK, or indeed Japan. I've seen signs saying "grassy verge" but that tends to be to point out that there's no kerb.

Yeah, verge is the first word that came to mind for me too.

OK, is verge only in common use in the UK? I think everyone who's said it so far was a Brit, and the yanks are going for collosal phrasal nouns.

Definitely call it (and hear it called) a verge here in Western Australia too.

Verge. SE England.

Reminds me of LOTR. Gandalf to Samf: A little late for trimming the verge, don't you think?

Wikipedia has a whole list of words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_verge

It's officially called a "road allowance" where I live.

Huh, "berm" actually is used for it...

Here, usually 'nature strip'. Sometimes 'median strip'. Occasionally 'verge' but it sounds distinctly British to me.

I am not familiar with any name for this. I would just call it a strip of grass myself.

(I have never heard the terms (grassy) verge, berm, nature strip, or road allowance before, and this certainly is not a median (strip), which goes in the middle of a street. It is not a parkway or boulevard either, which are types of streets.)

OK, it's official.
UK, and by diffusion some parts of the commonwealth: verge
USA: no agreed upon term
I'd be most interested to know what Canadians call it.

brandrinn wrote:I'd be most interested to know what Canadians call it.

To be clear, I'm from Toronto, and I generally heard it called a boulevard (which always seemed a little strange to me, since 'boulevard' can also have the regular meaning of '(large) street').

Travis B. wrote:(I have never heard the terms (grassy) verge, berm, nature strip, or road allowance before, and this certainly is not a median (strip), which goes in the middle of a street. It is not a parkway or boulevard either, which are types of streets.)

I just want to make sure you weren't misunderstanding me. People definitely use the word 'boulevard' to refer to this thing. I mentioned median (strip) only because I was speculating that since boulevards (the streets) often tend to have medians that may be grassy, perhaps by analogy the median itself became known as a boulevard, and by extended analogy, any grassy strip running parallel to a street (even on the side of the street) came to be called a boulevard. Meanwhile, boulevard still retains its normal meaning of 'street'. But really it's just speculation.

West-coast Canadian: I just call it "that grassy bit by the sidewalk"

It's an Easement. Here in Fargo the city technically owns it and the trees on it, though the property owner has to keep it mowed. Because we still have great gobs of our beloved elm trees on our easements the city takes them VERY seriously. if you so much as prune one of the easement elms without the city's permission you will be in deep doo-doo.

Here, an easement is a long access point between several properties and the nearest road. A friend of mine grew up in a house at the end of a long easement. His parents had a responsibility to make sure that the residents of the other two properties always had safe access to their homes.

In German this is called Grünstreifen ("green strip"). This can also mean a strip of greenery at the side of a highway (where there normally is no sidewalk or cycling lane) or a strip of greenery separating a road into lanes going into oppsite directions.

Verge as well I think. But if you just said "verge2 to me I'd think of a grassy area or bank at the side of the road with no pavement on the other side at all, just a hedge, fence, wall or possibly a field.

brandrinn wrote:I'd be most interested to know what Canadians call it.

Well, as noted on Wikipedia, "road/street allowance" are officially used in Ontario (but most people wouldn't know this name since it's technical), and "(roadside) boulevard" seems common too (though it sounds weird to me, since a boulevard is a type of street). There's also the term "road right-of-way" (another strange technical term), which emphasizes the part where things like road signs are placed, but it looks like it can include things like sidewalks and ditches too. Unofficially, most people don't call it by any name or know that it has a name, but "grass" and "(front) lawn" would be most common since people take care of it as part of their lawn. Otherwise, I assume "grassy part by the road", "grass strip" and "road verge" are some possibilities to be specific.

In French Canada, the following terms exist: "voirie" (may or may not include the road itself), "accotement (de route)", "emprise (routière)" or "empiètement". The term "emprise" may or may not be all-inclusive like "road right-of-way". And "empiètement" generally denotes that the strip is not dedicated for road purposes, but other purposes such as phone lines, optic cables, etc. Like in English, most people would just refer to it as "le gazon" (the lawn) or "l'herbe" (the grass) and would use descriptive phrases to be specific.

In at least Seattle it has a reasonably established name: the "parking strip". Even though nobody ever actually parks on it. These spaces are maintained by the homeowner, not the city, and many do other things with it than leave it grassy. In small-lot neighborhoods hardly any of them have grass because they may be the best space available for gardening in, so you see block after block with parking strips full of flowers, bushes and small trees, or indeed even vegetables. Some people pave them or fill them with gravel or wood chips so as to need less maintenance.

Also, "easement" is a term for the legal status of a piece of land, namely land owned by one party but which another party has the right to use - such as parking strips, access roads, or a utility line right-of-way. You guys and/or your speech communities may have adopted narrower uses of the word than its general legal meaning.