American couple discovers UK's 'courgette' terminology at Tesco self-checkout

Savannah Smith and her husband Kalani have built a following by documenting the small shocks of transatlantic life—the things that seem ordinary on one side of the ocean and utterly foreign on the other. They post regularly on TikTok about the differences between living in the US and navigating the UK. But nothing quite prepared them for a Tuesday afternoon at Tesco.

They were in the produce section, standing at one of the self-service scales that have become standard in British supermarkets over recent years. These stations let shoppers weigh loose vegetables and fruit—bananas, apples, onions, potatoes, and the like—and print out a barcode label that reflects the correct price for the weight. The label gets scanned later at self-checkout or handed to a staff member at a traditional till. It's a system designed to move customers through the store efficiently and prevent disputes over pricing. In the US, Savannah explained in the video she posted, you simply weigh your produce at the checkout itself. You don't do it beforehand. You don't print a sticker. You don't navigate a touchscreen menu of vegetable names.

But that's exactly what they had to do at Tesco. And that's where the real confusion began. They typed "zucchini" into the scale's interface. Nothing. The word didn't exist in the system. Savannah, standing beside the machine with her phone recording, turned to the camera with visible bewilderment. "They don't call it a zucchini here," she said. Kalani supplied the answer: "They call it a courgette." He pronounced it with a hard 'g'—like the word "guitar"—rather than the soft 'g' sound, as in "giraffe," that the French original carries. Savannah repeated the word back, equally uncertain of the pronunciation, equally amazed that such a common vegetable could have an entirely different name in a country that speaks English.

The video landed on TikTok and immediately drew responses. Some viewers found the couple's pronunciation hilarious. "I'm sorry for laughing at this pronunciation," one commenter wrote. Savannah replied simply: "Oops." Others leaned into the humor. One viewer said the mispronunciation was "damn near killing" them and joked about adopting it in their own household, adding that they'd also heard an American call Worcestershire sauce "wash your sister" sauce. A few viewers offered context: the word courgette is French in origin, and the entire world uses it except the United States, which renamed the vegetable zucchini. One person defended the couple's effort, noting they'd done well attempting a completely unfamiliar word.

But the video also surfaced a broader question about how supermarket systems handle regional language differences. One commenter noted that they lived in the UK, shopped regularly at Tesco, and had never used the scales at all—they didn't realize it was standard practice. Another pointed out that the label-printing step is really only necessary if you're using the handheld self-scan devices; traditional checkouts can weigh items on the spot. And someone else raised a practical point: most supermarket checkout software could easily redirect a search for "zucchini" to "courgette," accommodating both American and British terminology. It's the kind of small fix that might spare future American shoppers the moment of standing in front of a machine, searching for a word that doesn't exist in the database, realizing that even the names of vegetables are not universal.

The encounter, trivial as it seems, captures something real about moving between countries where the language is nominally the same but the vocabulary—and the systems built around it—can be entirely different. For Savannah and Kalani, it was a moment of genuine surprise. For viewers, it was a reminder that even the most basic grocery run can become an education in how much variation exists within English itself.