Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Start with the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines a sandwich as "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between." A hot dog is a split roll with a filling in between. The dictionary's own editors walked through it and landed where you'd expect: a hot dog is a sandwich.

Their best argument is the meatball sub. Nobody doubts that meatballs in a split roll make a sandwich. Swap the meatballs for a sausage and what changed? If the answer is the shape of the meat, that's a strange place to draw a line. And if one sausage doesn't count as a "filling," then neither does one slice of bologna, and the bologna sandwich is in trouble.

History helps too: the hot dog council admits the thing was once sold as a "Frankfurter sandwich" and a "Coney Island sandwich." Put simply, you'd call it a sandwich if you hadn't grown up calling it something else.

Nobody orders it as one. Ask for a sandwich at a ballpark and you won't get a hot dog. Words mean what people use them to mean, and almost nobody uses "sandwich" to mean a hot dog. A dictionary describes how people talk. It doesn't get to overrule them.

The bun is one piece. For most people a sandwich is two separate pieces of bread with something between them. A hot dog bun is a single roll, cut most of the way through, and the hinge is the whole difference.

It has its own bun and its own eating contest on TV. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council leans on this: calling it "just a sandwich," the council says, undersells it. One of its reasons is that nobody has ever sung about wishing they were a sandwich.

And the sandwich side proves too much. Once a split roll with a filling counts, it's hard to keep out the taco, which is a filling inside one folded piece of bread.

Merriam-Webster says sandwich, and says it plainly, on the strength of its own definition.

The hot dog industry says no. In November 2015 the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, a trade group for the industry, made it official policy that the hot dog is its own category, "a hot dog formerly known as a sandwich." Mental Floss covered the ruling at the time.

New York State says sandwich, at least for tax. Its sales tax bulletin on sandwiches, TB-ST-835, lists "hot dogs and sausages on buns, rolls, etc." as taxable sandwiches, next to burritos and gyros. The tax office isn't trying to settle your argument. It wants the sales tax.

A Massachusetts court came close. In 2006, in a lease fight over whether a Qdoba could open in the same shopping center as a Panera, a judge ruled that "sandwich" is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos or quesadillas. Hot dogs weren't on trial, but the logic is the anti-sandwich side's. Mental Floss has more on how the law defines a sandwich.

The internet says taco. The cube rule, a joke system that sorts food by where the starch sits, puts the hot dog with the taco: bread on the bottom and two sides. It also says pizza is toast, so use it carefully.

The real answer comes from psychology. In the 1970s the psychologist Eleanor Rosch showed that people don't treat categories as a strict yes or no. Some members are better examples than others. In a 1975 study, she had people rate how good an example of furniture various things were. A chair came out at the top and a telephone near the bottom. Both counted. One counted more.

This is called prototype theory, and it explains the hot dog. Everyone carries around a picture of the most sandwich-like sandwich: two slices of bread with something flat in the middle. A hot dog has the bread and the filling and misses the rest. So it sits at the fuzzy edge of the category, where the definition says one thing and your gut says another. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has the long version.

So both sides are right about different things. The sandwich side argues from the definition, the other side from the prototype, and neither will ever convince the other. That's what makes it a good question.

Don't try to settle it. Run it.

Have everyone answer at once, then make each side define the word. The sandwich side has to say what a sandwich is without letting in a taco. The other side has to say what a sandwich is without kicking out a sub. Both are harder than they sound, and the first person to say "you know what I mean" loses.

When that runs out, these are the same fight about other things. Each one is a question of what counts.

For more food fights, try the food debates. The rest of the best arguments are on debate topics.

"Is a hot dog a sandwich?" is a card in Fuzzy Logic, the free deck of The Lobbyist. Everyone picks a side in secret on their own phone, then one player is told to argue the side they didn't pick. So you argue about buns while watching for whoever is arguing about buns a little too hard. Then you vote, and the phones show who was faking. If you end up defending the side you think is wrong, here's how to argue it anyway. How to play.