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up vote 25 down vote favorite

English is not my first language, so I'm not sure what you commonly call one of these:

Whiteboard

I'm trying to choose between blackboard, white blackboard, or maybe just 'slate'.

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19  
That's a terrible sin(x)! – Tim N Jun 22 '11 at 20:29
2  
The cuerpo is even worse. – Mike DeSimone Jun 22 '11 at 20:53
4  
What's wrong with whiteboard? – Ivo Flipse Jun 22 '11 at 21:07
I just ignored the existance of that word since I'm no English speaker. – vemv Jun 22 '11 at 21:43
3  
@vemv: I am guessing that you speak a language such as French where "ignore" or its cognate means "not know". It has a different meaning in English: it means "intentionally avoid acknowledging". So "I ignored the existence of that word" to an English speaker means "I pretended that word didn't exist (but I knew it did really)" [Just telling you this to be helpful, not meaning to belittle you.] – Colin Fine Jun 23 '11 at 16:38
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7 Answers

up vote 77 down vote accepted

That is quite simply a whiteboard.

Blackboard can be defined as:

A smooth, hard, dark-colored panel for writing on with chalk.

Whiteboard can be defined as:

A panel covered with white, glossy plastic for writing on with erasable markers.

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5  
There has also been a trend in recent decades to replace "blackboard" by "chalkboard". This does not affect whiteboards, however. – Colin Fine Jun 22 '11 at 16:55
3  
@Jasper: Same here, hence "chalkboard". – Mike DeSimone Jun 22 '11 at 20:44
1  
There are however black whiteboards for writing with neon-bright erasable markers. – crasic Jun 22 '11 at 21:09
oh, green boards. I thought it was because of political correctness brought to an extreme. – Agos Jun 22 '11 at 21:22
When whiteboards began to replace blackboards, I was still in school. The rumour was that they called it so because it was racist to have blackboards, but not whiteboards!! LOL – rmx Jun 23 '11 at 10:55
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up vote 10 down vote

That is, quite naturally, called whiteboard, Bierce does not have an entry for the word but it would probably be:

  • the writing board that always get written on with permanent marker
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4  
Indelible ink on a whiteboard? Now, that's unreasonable. If it always gets written on with such, it will soon cease to be white; and space in which to write will likewise become scarce indeed. – Mr. Disappointment Jun 22 '11 at 16:44
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@Mr. Disappointment, see details on Bierce's dictionary - dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict3&Database=devils – Unreason Jun 22 '11 at 16:46
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@Mr. Disappointment: (at the risk of spoiling a joke by explaining it) that site is full of cynical or ironic pseudo-definitions. – Colin Fine Jun 22 '11 at 16:55
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@Mr. Disappointment - Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is worth reading under any circumstances, but @Unreason is simply referring to the way he defined things in terms of their unintended consequences, or in terms of the (wrong) ways they inevitably get used. Imagine Murphy's Law crossed with the OED, and you get the Devil's Dictionary. So Bierce probably would have defined "whiteboard" just as @Unreason did. – MT_Head Jun 22 '11 at 16:59
4  
Years ago I worked in a corporate MIS department; we got the news that we had a new CIO, a purported business genius with a shiny new MBA. He came in to describe his vision for our exciting future; of course, he ignored the erasable markers attached to the whiteboard, and instead wrote with Magic Markers he'd picked up in the office next door. His "vision" for our "future" was laughable; the company was failing and our division was closed a year later... but right up until the end we had to write around his bullet points. I lost a lot of respect for the significance of an MBA that day. – MT_Head Jun 22 '11 at 17:09
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up vote 4 down vote

I refer to it as simply a whiteboard.

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1  
Thanks for the confirmation man. – vemv Jun 22 '11 at 16:48
up vote 28 down vote

I most often hear these referred to as dry erase boards.

enter image description here

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1  
This was the original term, so +1. "Whiteboard" has since become the shorthand, since dry erase markers aren't the only things that work on them, and some things actually work better for certain situations (for instance, Vis-a-Vis wet-erase markers don't rub off when someone brushes past the board) – KeithS Jun 22 '11 at 17:41
1  
Interestingly, Staples Online refers to the category as "whiteboards" but all the individual products are sold as "dry-erase boards". And the markers are only sold as "dry-erase markers". – smackfu Jun 22 '11 at 19:26
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The markers are "dry-erase" to differentiate them from "wet-erase" markers, which are used on overhead transparencies and required a wet rag to erase. Wet-erase markers are also useful on dry-erase boards, for markings that you don't want to erase with the dry-erase parts. For example, for a status list, you could write the team members' names in wet erase and the status in dry erase. This makes it hard to erase the name when erasing the status. – Mike DeSimone Jun 22 '11 at 20:48
1  
Tangential trick I learned in the army(!): you can draw on top of wet-erase lines with dry-erase markers and they will then dry-erase away. – Henrik N Jun 22 '11 at 22:12
@Henrik N: I learned that at middle school, and again in high school, and again in university. My elementary uses chalkboard. – Lie Ryan Jun 23 '11 at 3:51
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up vote 2 down vote

"Blackboard," has a nice archaic ring to it. I started in elementary school with blackboards, then they turned green, and we still called them blackboards. Now they're white, but to me it will stay a blackboard no matter what color it is.

"White blackboard," I've never heard used, except by sarcastic teens mocking my age.

"Slate," would confuse Americans, and, I belive, is not techincally correct since a "slate" is an individual item that one writes on, like a tablet, not something that is big enough to nail to the wall and show the room; that would be a big chunk of rock indeed.

So, if you want to be accurate, "dry erase board." But accuracy is boring and ugly.

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Nice contribution. And the humorous touches make it only better :) – vemv Jun 22 '11 at 20:28
Thank you, @vemv . – Dmitri Jun 23 '11 at 20:11
up vote 4 down vote

Also in common use is the generic term "the board", since most rooms only have a single whiteboard or chalkboard so there is no need to disambiguate between them.

For instance: "Student, please go write the answer on the board."

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up vote 2 down vote

The dry-erase boards are called simply "whiteboards" or I've heard "greaseboards."

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1  
Those were for actual grease. Well, "grease pencils", which are actually wax pencils, which are what children call "crayons", but the people using grease pencils are engaged in important, grown-up work, too busy to use "crayons". – Malvolio Jun 29 '11 at 16:40

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