Posted on 08/25/2025 9:59:19 AM PDT by Red Badger
In A Nutshell
Regional divide: Northerners and Californians say “soda,” Midwesterners say “pop,” and Southerners use “coke” generically for any soft drink.
Origins of soda: Began in the early 1800s as “soda water,” a health tonic sold at drugstore soda fountains and spas.
Why “pop”? Likely from the sound of corks popping on bottled fizzy drinks; popularized in the Midwest by bottling companies like Faygo.
Why “coke”? Coca-Cola’s dominance in the South made “coke” shorthand for any soft drink, much like Kleenex or Band-Aid became generic terms.
Soft vs. hard drinks: “Soft drink” originally meant nonalcoholic, as opposed to “hard” spirits.
Today: Americans drink nearly 40 gallons of soft drinks per person annually—no matter what they call it.
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With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts, at least until that wayward cousin asks for a “pop” in soda country, or even worse, a “coke” when they actually want a Sprite. Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop or coke.
The word you use generally boils down to where you’re from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, don’t bat an eyelash asking for coke – lowercase – before homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase.
As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.
Bubbles, Anyone?
Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s.
Vintage soda fountain inside New Orleans Pharmacy Museum.
A vintage soda fountain from 1855 inside the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. (Photo by Anatoliy Tesouro on Shutterstock) The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as “soda water.” The word “soda” likely came from “sodium,” since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.
Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.
By the mid-1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root-, fruit- and herb-infused concoctions, such as sassafras-based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods.
These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word “soda” with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water.
Seltzer – today’s popular term for such sparkling water – was around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.
A vintage drug store and soda fountain bar
Many late-19th-century and early 20th-century drugstores contained soda fountains – a nod to the original belief that the sugary, bubbly drink possessed medicinal qualities. This photo shows the interior of old drug store with bar stools and soda fountain in the French Quarter of New Orleans. (Photo by Joseph Sohm on Shutterstock)
Regional Naming Patterns
So how did “soda” come to be called so many different things in different places? It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.
The popularity of “soda” in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain’s longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.
As for the Midwestern preference for “pop” – well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called “ginger pop.” Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The “pop” seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking.
Faygo Boat Song TV commercial - 1970's
VIDEAO AT LINK.............
VIDEO: A jingle for Faygo touts the company’s “red pop.”
Linguists don’t fully know why “pop” became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works – today known as Faygo Beverages – that used “pop” in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the “pop” sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.
As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of “Coke” for “Coca-Cola.” But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for “Coke.”
Advertisement for orange soda reading 'a soft drink made from real oranges.' No alcohol means not ‘hard’ but ‘soft.’ Nostalgic Collections/eBay
As with Jell-O, Kleenex, Band-Aids and seltzer, it became a generic term.
What’s Soft About It?
Speaking of soft drinks, what’s up with that term? It was originally used to distinguish all nonalcoholic drinks from “hard drinks,” or beverages containing spirits.
Interestingly, the original Coca-Cola formula included wine – resembling a type of alcoholic “health” drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani. But Pemberton went on to develop a “soft” version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink.
Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually “soft drink” came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America’s enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.
With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you what. Just don’t call it healthy.
Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno. She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Yeah, "soda pop" always sounds to me like something Barney Fife might say.
I grew up in the fifties in the Kansas side suburbs of Kansas City. Most of my school mates called it soda-pop. New kids from elsewhere thought it odd.
I grew up in the fifties in the Kansas side suburbs of Kansas City. Most of my school mates called it soda-pop. New kids from elsewhere thought it odd.
SW Indiana it was always either pop or coke (little c as in generic).
In Japan the ramune bottles are still made like this with the little ball stopper....you can find it in some stores in the US now, mainly asian marts and such.
Well, that is kind of amazing! I’m going to look for some of those. Thank you!
I thought THG had done something with this, but noticed nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheHistoryGuyChannel/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@TheHistoryGuyChannel/search?query=soda
Parents and therefor us kids growing up called it that but I’m not sure the source. Either a MA Yankee thing or my parents having been born in the 1920s.
It’s definitely a Mass thing.
Southern speak: cold drink (or drank)
I grew up in “pop” country. When I moved to the south someone asked me if I wanted a coke - I said I’d prefer a Mountain Dew if you have one. Just looked at me like I was crazy.
If I recall a knockout from an electrical box was a good starting point.
Foil from a gum wrapper slid into the right place in the right side of a pay phone could generate a dial tone.
A friend used a coil and recorder to get the characteristics of coins dropped into a pay phone. A little analysis with an o’scope gave him enough info to build a box to recreate the tone patterns. He used it once to verify that it worked, called it his ‘wooden nickel’ then stored it.
Hmmm... Interesting. Thanks for the Fact Check.
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