WATCH: The Phrases That Define Austin, Nashville, Atlanta and More, According to Yelp Reviews
In the past 15 years, Yelp has become a platform with nearly 200 million reviews and more than 40 million words of gratitude—no small feat considering it started as a project in business school when founder Jeremy Stoppelman came down with the flu and was looking for a better way find a great doctor online.
Yelp turns 15 this October, and to toast what has morphed into "the yellow pages" of the 21st century, they've launched Yelp15.com. The interactive site takes a look at everything from the rise and fall of beauty treatments to spikes in food trends (Step aside, sushi burrito and rolled ice cream, 2019 is all about the Impossible Burger and oat milk).
One category that caught our eye in the Yelp15 tribute? The "Phrases That Define Our Cities" section, which created visual word clouds to show what words are most popular in cities throughout our country. To create each word cloud, Yelp data gurus looked at 15 years of Yelp reviews and compared "the language in reviews in dozens of cities to the Yelp vernacular nationwide." Using 100,000 randomly chosen reviews in each city, the word clouds reveal the words and two-word phrases that are most common in each city's reviews relative to the country's reviews as a whole.
To see what Southern cities can't get enough of pimento cheese and Kroger and which are fixin' for house dressing and burnt ends, watch our video above featuring cities such as Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Nashville, Tampa, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, and more.
So raise your glass of sweet tea, and be prepared for some laughs and surprises.
Spoiler alert: Atlanta, we're glad you've stayed true to your Waffle House loyalty and peach cobbler devotion, but what's with all the lemon pepper love?
