This is a bubbler (a bubbler-brand bubbler, too!):

iirc from the last time this came up, they were super popular in the "bubbler"-using regions so the name stuck around to describe all drinking fountains, not just bubblers.

Wife still uses bubbler to this day. It was (is?) a brand name.

This reminds me of the similar map of names for soft drinks. You have your soda vs coke, but I live in one of the "pop" regions which is admittedly a larger area than these little "bubbler" enclaves.

I mostly switched over to "soda" once I went to college though. A nationwide and international assortment of group members will encourage that.

WTF? A bubbler is a kind of weed pipe.

Living in northern Minnesota, drinking fountain and water fountain get used interchangeably. And I've only known one person that used bubbler regularly. But they weren't in their right mind most of the time.

And ain't nothing IDs a Minnesotan faster than hot dish vs casserole or even worse, Duck Duck Grey Duck vs Duck Duck Grey Goose. We WILL go to war over that stuff.

"is there a water fountain here?"

"Yeah, at the entrance to the neighborhood in the retaining pond"

Wait til you hear that one random tiny state calls milkshakes "cabinets"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_cabinet

I grew up near the triple point so I change phases between drinking fountain and water fountain while encountering the occasional bubbler

People in New Hampshire watching the Bluey episode "Bin Night"

It's disappointing when these are cut off at the Canadian border. Canada is influenced by both the UK and the US, and has been drifting towards the US over recent decades. Plus, Canada has some really weird dialect areas like Newfoundland.

It would be interesting to see which terms drift north of the border, and which ones stop at the border. How hard is the border when it comes to dialects? Does the fact that people live most of their lives on one side of the border mean that the language doesn't tend to drift across it? Or do people hear their neighbours talk and begin to adopt some terms? My guess would be that these days it's more influenced by what's on TV or on the Internet.

elbow pasta?

And then there's that town that made up its own language.

I'm from bubbler country! Idk why but I like it. I know drinking fountain makes more sense tho

Smells french.

Water fountain is the ornamental thing you see in a park with multiple tiers full of gross water and coins.

What do they call a water fountain if it’s not the drinking kind?

And having lived in the “bubbler” zone, I’ve never once heard it called that. Must be disappearing.

British: "sippy squirty drinkingdale"

You mean the water discharging reservoir?

I live in Australia and I use these interchangeably for some reason, but ive mainly been calling them “water bubblers”, not sure why though lol, nobody here calls it that.

Abreuvoir

Water dispenser

It's Herb Kohl's fault lol