9 Things Missourians Say That Baffle Everyone Else

A stranger orders dessert at a St. Louis custard stand, and the server tips it upside down without warning.

The stranger flinches.

Regulars barely look up because that upside-down move is just one of the Missouri habits that comes with its own vocabulary.

These are the words and sayings that baffle everyone outside of Missouri.

1. Taking the Outer Road

Missourians call a frontage road an outer road, and the phrase alone stops an out-of-state driver cold.

Ask for directions near I-44 or I-70, and a Missourian will say something like “just get on the outer road” without a second thought.

Not on any map.

Regional dialect references trace “outer road” to Missouri and the St. Louis area, where it stands in for what people elsewhere call a frontage or service road.

A visitor hunting for a “frontage road” sign will drive right past every “outer road” sign in the state.

2. Calling Someone a Hoosier

Missourians in St. Louis call someone a hoosier when they mean the opposite of a compliment.

Everywhere else in the country, hoosier just means someone from Indiana.

In St. Louis, it’s an insult aimed at someone lazy, uncouth, or low-class, a meaning that survived in St. Louis long after it faded out almost everywhere else.

Historians still argue over exactly how the city ended up as the only place where the old insult stuck.

Confusion follows every time.

3. Saying Missou-rah

Missourians can’t even agree on how to say the name of their own state.

Some pronounce it Missou-ree.

Others say Missou-rah, especially in older and more rural communities, according to University of Missouri dialect research.

Sociolinguist Matthew Gordon has joked that the split often runs inside a single family: Many Missourians have an uncle who says Missou-rah while they themselves say Missou-ree.

Even locals can’t settle it.

4. Where’d You Go to High School?

Missourians in St. Louis ask this question of near strangers, and it has nothing to do with enrollment.

The question surfaces at job interviews, at parties, even after a minor fender bender, according to St. Louis Magazine.

Nowhere else does it.

St. Louisans use the answer to place someone’s neighborhood, income, and social circle within seconds, long before anyone thinks to ask a name.

Outsiders usually just stare back, wondering why their high school still matters.

5. Ordering a Concrete

Missourians in St. Louis order a concrete when they want dessert, and first-time visitors picture a construction site instead of a milkshake.

Ted Drewes invented the term in 1959, blending frozen custard so thick that servers hand it over upside down without spilling a drop.

A neighborhood boy named Steve Gamber kept complaining that his shake wasn’t thick enough, so Ted Drewes Jr. handed him one made with no milk at all.

It stuck.

Order a shake in Missouri, and the answer might come back frozen solid and upside down.

6. Grabbing T-Ravs

Missourians shorten toasted ravioli down to t-ravs, and the nickname alone confuses anyone who's never had one.

The dish started on The Hill, a St. Louis Italian neighborhood, sometime in the 1940s.

Two Hill restaurants, Charlie Gitto's and Mama's on the Hill, still argue over who invented it first, backed by a newspaper ad from 1943.

Both fry breaded ravioli and serve it with marinara instead of boiling it.

That's the whole trick.

Order t-ravs outside Missouri, and many servers will just look confused.

7. Turn on Double A

Missourians give driving directions that sound like a spelling test to anyone from out of state.

Instead of route numbers, thousands of miles of Missouri highway carry a letter instead: Route Z, Route AA (Missourians just say "Double A"), Route PP (read aloud as "Double P").

No numbers at all.

Missouri's lettered supplemental routes make up more than 19,000 miles, over half the state's highway system, and only Wisconsin runs the same letters-only setup nationwide.

A Mid-Missouri house cleaner told the Columbia TV station KOMU 8 her phone's map app once read two of those routes back to her as "ahh and ooh."

Newcomers just idle at the intersection, waiting for a number that never comes.

8. Missouri Side

Missourians spend a surprising amount of time explaining that Kansas City sits in Missouri, not Kansas.

Kansas City, Missouri was incorporated back in 1853, eight years before Kansas even joined the Union.

Small towns just across the state line adopted the same name in 1872, hoping to borrow some of Missouri's momentum.

The confusion never left.

A Kansas City newspaper editorial argued as late as 1878 that the Missouri city was, in its words, "the legitimate outgrowth of the state of Kansas."

Missourians still just answer "the Missouri side" and keep walking.

9. Gooey Butter Cake

Missouri claims a dessert whose own name sounds like a complaint: Gooey butter cake.

St. Louis bakers reportedly invented it by accident in the 1930s, after a south-side shop flipped its butter-to-flour ratio and sold the sticky result anyway.

Customers kept coming back.

Order it by name outside St. Louis, and many servers have never heard of it, let alone tasted it.

The name still sounds made up to newcomers.

Missouri's Three-Way Accent Divide

Missouri's own accent splits along fault lines many residents never stop to think about.

University of Missouri researcher Matthew Gordon spent years analyzing old recordings of Missourians born as far back as the 1880s, and found a state whose speech keeps shifting.

St. Louis developed into its own dialect island, separate enough from the rest of the state that linguists study it on its own.

Three accents, one state.

The Ozark hills in the south held onto older Appalachian-style speech patterns longer than the rest of the state, carried in by Scotch-Irish settlers who moved into the region from Appalachia in the 1800s.

Kansas City leans toward the state's northern, Midland speech patterns instead, closer to Iowa than to St. Louis or the Ozarks.