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.
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... 🙄
You're being downvoted because your question makes no sense. Both NYC and New York State are mentioned, so what are you even asking for clarification on?
Since a lot of people have upstate, there are some places that have a downstate in the southern part of the state, the best examples I can think of being Illinois and Maine.
It just happens to be that you've heard upstate more because New York City is a lot more depicted in American media.
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”.
Def depends where you’re at. In Virginia we call upstate Nova (northern VA). In NJ it’s North Jersey (I’m originally from South Jersey) PA is more east west oriented since Philly and Pittsburgh are east and west ends of the state.
I'm probably wrong, but I think it means somewhere north of the capital city, and maybe it's only used in New York
Upstate is used in South Carolina as well, used to refer to the western and more mountainous part of the state. The eastern non-mountainous part of the state is called low-country.
My understanding is that it means going, loosely, to the opposite side of the state of the major metropolitan area in that state. Upstate NY is the northwest part, upstate MA is the west part, upstate PA is the northeast part. I'm looking around, and it seems to also 1) only be used on a few states, 2) usually is on the north half (but not always), and 3) is somewhat interchangable with "rural".
it's very common in the greater NYC area to refer to the rest of the state, esp. the more rural parts (even if a lot of the state does not consider itself "upstate").
Outside main city? For NY it's any area outside New York City. Like Albany or Rochester.
It refers to the northern part of whatever state the speaker happens to be in. It's mostly used by New Yorkers to refer to the more rural part of New York State which is North of New York City.
Downstate is a thing, I guess, but neither upstate nor downstate are used much outside of New York in my experience.
