Barm vs cob: Why Britain has so many names for a bread roll (2024)

Over centuries, Britons have been divided over just what to call a bread roll. The patchwork of alternative names say much about its history and how the English language evolved.

The picture Laurel MacKenzie sends me shows an unassuming item: a small round loaf of bread. But ask around at the office, at university, anywhere where people gather from various corners of the UK, and you'll get a great flood of answers about what to call it.

A cob, a roll, a bun, a barm, a batch, a bap – it's just flour, yeast, salt, and water, but the country seems to be overflowing with different names for the humble morsel. MacKenzie, an American linguist now at NYU, began many years ago to ask her students at University of Manchester about the picture. The answers are still rolling in. Why are there so many words for a bap?

MacKenzie's map of eight common words for a small round loaf of bread shows that there are clear regional variations. "Roll" crops up everywhere, but it's most common in the south, with "bun", which also shows up throughout the country, being the favoured word in the North East. "Barm" is very localised to the Manchester area, and "batch" is incredibly specific: this is used just by residents of Liverpool and Coventry.

A good-sized handful of people in the north say "muffin" or "tea cake" (and they would expect this to be an unsweetened, currant-free loaf). "Bap" – the (to me) utterly novel word that, when I moved to the UK from America, told me I was not in Kansas anymore – is used throughout the country.

Wait, there's more: during a Zoom call on the subject of words for small round loaves of bread, Jonnie Robinson, lead curator of spoken English at the British Library, held up a children's ABC-style image. "C is for Cob," it read. It was a coaster sold as a souvenir in Nottingham, he explained, and showed a certain self-aware pride in the local word. For many people who live in either fairly stable or fairly isolated places, these words are used without much fanfare. But when people leave where they are from, the regional versions of the words become talismans.

"We have lots of wonderful recordings of people moving to London and saying 'I'm off to buy a cob', 'I'm off to the cob shop'," he said. "It becomes a badge of identity in the office: That's the person who calls it a bap or cob." Robinson, who coauthored a scholarly book on East Midlands English in 2018, says that cob shop talk featured prominently. You're more likely to buy a coaster that says "C is for Cob", perhaps, if few people around you would call it the same thing.

As someone from America, a huge physical space with comparatively little variation in English, the idea that there are at least eight words for a small loaf of bread in a space much smaller than the state of California is surprising. We have our regionalisms – the soda versus pop one is very well-known – but these cover enormous swaths of land. Where did all these words come from in the first place?

The key thing is how long English has been spoken in a given place, says Robinson.

"What we call English has been spoken here in the UK for over a thousand years. It arrives in the mouths of Germanic settlers," he says. "Different tribes from northern Europe settled in different areas… And it developed in isolation and became what we called English."

Some of the words for a small round loaf of bread are Germanic in origin – "batch," which is also used more generally to describe a group of small objects, may come from "bachen," or "bake", says Robinson. "Roll" comes from French and would have arrived with Norman invaders later. MacKenzie, pulling up the Oxford English Dictionary entries for these words, notes that a lively variety of processes went into creating them.

"You can see that a number of common pathways of new word formation are in evidence: borrowing (roll was borrowed from French), synecdoche (barm meaning yeast gets transferred to bread, the thing containing the yeast), semantic narrowing (cob meaning something round comes to refer specifically to a round bread), and compounding (putting together two existing words of the language to form a new one, e.g. teacake)," she wrote in an email. These all cropped up at quite different times over the course of the last thousand-odd years.

Once words were in common usage, the fact that people largely stayed where they were from played a major role in cementing these regional differences, says Mackenzie. "Separation plus time is what gives you dialect differences," she said.

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Now, when national supermarkets and brands tend to opt for one name across the whole country, using a dialect word is only really feasible for small, local suppliers, says Robinson. He gives the example of a pre-packed ham and cheddar cheese sandwich he bought in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. The local word for such a thing is "cob", and it duly appears on the label. That's one reason why, perhaps, people love to talk about their local words for small round loaves of bread. If the world feels more and more hom*ogenous, language is one way to hang on to difference.

Will new words for bread enter English, and will they be regional variants? Robinson points to "bagel" as a word for a bread product that arrived in English not long ago – the OED has it first appearing in print in 1898. He speculates that because the era in which bagels have become widespread in the English-speaking world has involved such swift communication, we've just got the one word for the round, boiled-then-baked foodstuff. "Panini", for a hot-pressed sandwich, arrived from Italy in the 1950s.

"Because they are so recent, they've become universal," he says.

One thing is for sure: The English language is not done changing, and not just when it comes to describing a bread roll. Or should that be cob?

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