Patty’s Day – it’s worse than you thought

Did you cringe when you read Patty’s Day there? Yes? Good. That means you understand that Paddy’s Day isn’t about burger meat, and that Ireland's patron saint wasn’t called St. Patricia (handy cheat sheet here).

Unfortunately, we at Eventbrite have bad news for Paddy’s Day purists:

In the US, Patty’s Day is winning over Paddy's Day.

Thousands of Americans have used Eventbrite over the years to organise their own St. Patrick’s Day events, and we’ve analysed more than 4000 of them since 2014.

Let's start with the good news: the vast majority (around 80% or 4 out of 5) of those events play it safe and use ‘St. Patrick’ in the title, avoiding the contentious spelling of the short version altogether. Clever cookies. It’s the remaining 20 percent, however, that are ‘interesting’.

That's where we see a clear trend towards the use of ‘Patty’s Day’ over ‘Paddy’s Day’ (this includes the very unfortunate souls who named their event Paddys Day or Pattys Day – without the somewhat essential apostrophe).  

Patty’s Day, our data indicates, has been on the rise since 2014, and even surpassed Paddy’s Day for the first time in 2017, when it handily beat Paddy’s Day by a ratio of 3:1. This ratio has improved somewhat last year, but we’re still looking at a US Patty majority in 2019, where we found two Patties for one Paddy.

What does this all mean, though? Is the correct spelling of an event really that important? Of course not. What counts is that people around the world get together to celebrate Irish heritage and culture, and maybe have a pint or two.

That, after all, is the true spirit and magic of Patty's Day.