Smörgåsbord in English Is Smorgasbord: Where the Ö and Å Go

How to spell smorgasbord in English is simple: plain, with no marks, the way the dictionaries print it. Every English dictionary and style guide that answered AccentPad's check on 2026-10-25 prints the word without marks. Smörgåsbord, with an ö and an å, is the Swedish word it was borrowed from: correct in Swedish, understood in English, and the form Swedish dictionaries print.

Merriam-Webster and Cambridge sent back HTTP 403 that day and are not in the table. The Swedish rows come from Svenska Akademien's own dictionaries on svenska.se, a site that only shows its entries once a browser has run its scripts.

Butter, goose and table: what are the three words inside smörgåsbord?

The smorgasbord origin is Swedish: smörgåsbord is smörgås, an open sandwich, plus bord, table, in Wiktionary's Swedish entry. Smörgås is older and is itself two words: smör, butter, and gås, goose. In Swedish dialect gås also meant a lump of butter, the American Heritage Dictionary and Dictionary.com explain, so a smörgås was bread with its butter on.

Wiktionary gives the reason for the goose: the butter sense of gås refers to the bird's way of floating on water, like the small lumps of butter that rise on cream while it is churned. Wikipedia adds that the lumps were the right size to be pressed flat on bread, so smörgås came to mean buttered bread.

Svenska Akademiens ordbok, the academy's historical dictionary, shows the word's older life:

• Its first and now rare sense is a knob of butter on a piece of bread.
• Its main sense, a slice of bread with butter and toppings, is quoted from 1538.
• Kasta smörgås, to throw a sandwich, is a game: skipping a flat stone across water as many times as it will bounce.

What do the ring on å and the dots on ö change in Swedish?

In Swedish, å and ö are letters of their own, not a and o with decoration. Svensk ordbok's alphabet bar ends Z, Å, Ä, Ö, and Wiktionary calls ö the last letter of the Swedish alphabet and å the third from last. Each one has its own vowel sound:

• Å began as two a's written one above the other, Wiktionary says, and stands for /oː/ or /ɔ/.
• Ö is /øː/ when long and /œ/ when short, and opens to [œ̞] before r.
• In smörgåsbord both are short: Wiktionary transcribes the word /ˈsmœrɡɔsˌbuːrd/.

The plain o of bord is the surprise. It is said like a long oo, /uː/, so the Swedish word ends boord. English speakers read the same letters as an English word, and the usual smorgasbord pronunciation in English ends bawrd.

The o with umlaut page and the a with circle page list every way to type the two letters. The Swedish alphabet page shows where they sit after z.

Gas or goose: what does smorgasbord spell to a Swedish reader?

Without its marks, smörgåsbord spells words a Swede would not use there. Gås, said /ɡoːs/, is goose; gas, said /ɡɑːs/, is the Swedish word for gas, borrowed from Dutch, according to Wiktionary. Taking the ring off å turns the goose, and the butter it stood for, into a gas.

Svensk ordbok says as much about the English form. Its entry notes that smörgåsbord belongs to the Swedish words with some international spread, and that abroad it is often distorted to smorgasbord. The dictionary illustrates the point with a book title: Smorgasbordet, a 1974 collection of short stories by Lars Ardelius about Swedes living abroad.

So the two spellings are two words now. In Swedish the marks are compulsory, and in English their absence is the house style of every English dictionary in the table.

When did smorgasbord reach English, and where did Americans first taste it?

The word is Swedish from the 1840s and English from the 1870s. Svensk ordbok dates smörgåsbord in Swedish to 1842, and Svenska Akademiens ordbok's earliest quotation for it is from 1848. Dictionary.com dates the first English record to 1875–80.

The early English writers already dropped the marks. Wiktionary's first quotation for the English word, from an 1876 book, prints smorgasbord plainly, describing a small table of bread and butter, sardines, pickled herring and cheese in a saloon.

Americans met the meal itself later. Wikipedia says the smörgåsbord became known in the United States at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where the Swedish Pavilion's Three Crowns Restaurant served it. Between the 1950s and the 1970s some American restaurants advertised a smorgy, a name later replaced by buffet.

A buffet in Stockholm, any assortment in English: has the meaning moved?

The smorgasbord meaning in English has spread wider than the Swedish one. In English, smorgasbord means any buffet with many dishes, and by extension any varied collection: the American Heritage Dictionary's example is a smorgasbord of fashionable paranormal beliefs, and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary's a smorgasbord of games. In Sweden, Wikipedia says, the word means a buffet of mainly traditional dishes.

Swedish has caught up with the figurative sense. Svensk ordbok gives it with the example ett smörgåsbord av kurser, a smörgåsbord of courses. The Christmas version, julbord, Christmas table, is a smörgåsbord of its own, in Wikipedia.

The historical dictionary keeps two older uses. Writing in 1911, Klinckowström noted that Danes finish their meal with the smörgåsbord, unlike Swedes and Russians, who start with it. And in 1884 Heidenstam called Sweden smörgåsbordslandet, the land of the smörgåsbord, which the dictionary labels as disparaging.

Which languages keep the ring and the dots in smörgåsbord?

German, French and Dutch borrow the word with both marks: Wiktionary's translation table gives German Smörgåsbord, a neuter noun with a capital S, French smörgåsbord and Dutch smörgåsbord. Spanish writes smórgasbord, with an acute accent in place of the dots.

Sweden's neighbours mostly use their own names, according to Wikipedia:

• Danish: det kolde bord, the cold table.
• Norwegian: koldtbord or kaldtbord.
• Finnish: voileipäpöytä, butter-bread or sandwich table.
• Estonian: Rootsi laud, Swedish table.

The marks also turn up in English when a writer wants them. Wiktionary quotes a 2023 Guardian column that picks its examples from a smörgåsbord, though the Guardian's style guide spells the word plain. Doppelgänger is another word English took from a language that puts dots over its vowels.