Geordie People

In this section we intend to help you get a better insight into the language, accent and character of the Geordie people.

The Geordie nickname originates from and is used to describe people from the north east of England, specifically people from the areas of North And South Tyneside, Northumberland (which includes Tynedale and Hexham) and the mainly western areas of County Durham.

The terms Geordie or Geordie’s probably originated from the fact that the miners in the north east coalfields used George Stephenson’s safety lamps to prevent underground explosions, rather than the Davy lamp which was more commonplace.

If that’s true then maybe Geordies have George Stephenson to thank for not having the nickname “Davies” instead.

The term Geordie also used to encompass all the people living in the north east areas of Sunderland and Middlesbrough, however, this has been dropped by a large proportion of the people in these areas where many now seem to prefer to be recognised as Mackem’s or Smoggie’s respectively.

In reality the origin of the term Geordie is a bit of a moot point because wherever the collective term for the north east people originated, what can not be disputed is that true Geordies are very proud of the nickname and except in exceptional circumstances never feel belittled by the very common practice other people in the UK have for using their surname to distinguish them from other Geordies.

This this can be easily seen by inputting the name Geordie followed by a surname into the Google search engine where at the last count for example there were 226,000 different search results for Geordie Smith.

« The Geordie Accent