I hear it in movies so the time. We’re going upstate. I went upstate. Etc
I never hear downstate, or similar. Does it just mean going north?
It’s a New York thing to refer to the rural Northern and Western parts of New York State that are not New York City. No one (or at least very very few) outside of New York State uses it to refer to any other place.
Anything north of 34th Street is upstate, fight me
New York the state or NYC?
Edit: I am terribly sorry for not knwing all citiies and to what state and where they belong on the us map as someone not from North America… 🙄
“The Northern and Western parts of New York State that are not new York City” how is there any confusion?
It’s a New York thing
New York the state or NYC?
In my experience people in the Northeast US pretty much never refer to New York City as just ‘New York’. New York will mean the state, they will say ‘the city’ or ‘NYC’ to differentiate from the state. Or they will say upstate to mean the rest of the state outside of NYC metro area.
Like others are saying, it is a new york thing. But in general, upstate means further from the city than where the speaker lives. Until you crouse some imaginary line, then downstate means closer to the city. Comonly, but not always, it is used in a derogatory sense. They city people think the upstaters are rural hicks. And the upstaters think the city people couldn’t survive outside a city. Source, I grew up in an area that didn’t consider itself upstate, but all the city people sure did.
Is it due to the fact NYC is in the southern part of NY?
Yes but also when people are telling someone they’re from New York they tend to assume the city, so the follow-up answer is for clarification. The state is big and wildly different from NYC
Yeah, I went sightseeing to Niagara Falls, then to Buffalo. They’re nothing like NYC.
I think it’s elevation as much as north/south.
this really only applies to New York, as New York City is in the bottom little bit of the state’s southern nubbin and the rest of the state is commonly called “Upstate New York” since when people outside the northeast refer to New York, they’re talking about New York City, rather than the state of New York. thus Upstate New York was shortened to Upstate. (it seems to hold that most people i know who grew up in the northeast call New York City “NYC” rather than what i used growing up which was “New York.”
I am an american, I grew up in a state in the south west, no one ever used the term “going upstate” for anything because there was no such place to go.
I guarantee you only see dialog such as this in media set in NYC.
It works just like updog
What does that mean?
A lot of people are saying it’s primarily a NY thing, so I’d just chime in to say we use it in PA as well, at least in the Philly area, to refer to the northern parts of the state.
Not much more to it than youre going far enough north to be out of your city’s metro area, but staying in the same state. In PA I’d say upstate probably starts around the Poconos. I think new Yorkers kind of tend to use it to refer to the rest of the state, we wouldn’t tend to do that here, Central and Western PA are different things than Upstate PA, although there is definitely some overlap and there’s not exactly clearly defined borders.
I don’t know how many other states use the same terminology, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty common in other largish states with larger population densities in the southern part of the state and lower densities in the north (I don’t know off the top of my head which other states that would apply to, maybe it’s only PA and NY)
I have never called any part of PA upstate. (Not that it’s wrong that you do) Everyone I know calls the northern half of the eastern third of the state “the Northeast” or NEPA. Western PA is the entire western third of the state, and Central PA is for some reason only the southern half of the middle third of the state. I guess maybe the northern half of the middle third could be upstate, but I think I just don’t have a word for it.
This is absolutely reflective of my experience in PA as well. Everything you said and exactly as you said it.
Nothing is “upstate”.
NEPA is anything north of 80 and (roughly) east of where the Susquehanna splits near Selinsgrove.
Western PA is the whole state, north to south, from the Ohio border to approximately 219.
Central PA is south of 80, between 219 in the west, and east up to and including Lancaster county.
The part that’s left over is usually just called “north central PA”, but there’s not much of anything up there, so it’s usually referred to by specific county or town in that region, and most frequently when you do hear that, it’s someone describing where their hunting camp is.
PA really should probably be at least three separate states.
As long as I don’t have to be associated with Pittsburgers I’ll be happy.
Pittsburgh and Philly with Kentucky in the middle!
I lived in the Harrisburg area for 30 years and I’ve never heard it used to refer to any part of PA.
I live in Southern California and we don’t really use that phrase around here. I think it’s almost entirely used to refer to basically any area of New York north of NYC.
Yeah, I’ve lived in quite a few different states, but only in NYC do I hear and use “upstate.”
A place where people use the phrase steamed hams.
I guess you might be hearing it movies set in New York City, which is in the southern tip of the state of New York. All the other notable cities, the Catskill mountains, Niagara Falls, and other attractions are all further north, or upstate. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the expression got picked up by a wider crowd to mean “north”.
It means the Northern part of the state, typically when the state has a North-South cultural divide. It’s not exclusive to the US though, I’ve seen it used in places like Sao Paulo and Lagos before. Anywhere where one locality serves as a drain on the rest will get people to refer to different halves of the place, I guess nobody learned from Athens and Sparta.
Similarly the small town I grew up in had “the other side of the tracks”
In Illinois you might hear “downstate” to refer to anything south of Champaign-Urbana
In Michigan, there is “downstate” it means heading to the southern part of the state.
upstate: situated or occurring in the northern part of a state, especially the northern part of New York State as contrasted with New York City. “upstate New York”
It’s a New York thing. That state loosely divides into two regions: New York City to the south, and everything else to the north (“upstate”). I have heard people refer to the New York City area as “downstate” but that term is less common.
Similarly, Manhattan is loosely split into its northern portion (uptown), middle portion (midtown), and southern portion (downtown).
Ive heard it used to mean going to jail
Echoing a lot of the people here, I’ve personally only heard it used in New York state
