<p>Given the following HTML:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;select name="my_dropdown" id="my_dropdown"&gt;
&lt;option value="1"&gt;displayed text 1&lt;/option&gt;
&lt;/select&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>How do I grab the string "displayed text 1" using Javascript/the DOM?</p>

The displayed text is a child node of the option node.  You can use:
```
```
myOptionNode.childNodes[0];
```
```
to access it, assuming the text node is the only thing inside the option (and not other tags).
EDIT:
Oh yeah, as others mentioned, I completely forgot about:
```
```
myOptionNode.text;
```
```