“We don’t use the words “Up North” but we certainly promote our woods and water,” Anderson said. “Up North is more of a state of mind than a destination. Ever since I could remember it was just a regular term growing up.”

Wisconsin isn’t alone with its use of “Up North”.

A popular Minnesota T-shirt defines “Up North” as the upper one-third of the state while last summer, an opinion piece that ran in the Detroit Free Press, defined Up North in Michigan as anything north of a line stretching from Pentwater on Lake Michigan to Pinconning on Saginaw Bay. South of the line, the land is “flat and farmy,” Peter Gavrilovich wrote. “North of the line, fewer cars.”

In New York, say you’re headed Up North and people will think you’re going to one of the state’s prisons Up State.

Eric Raimy, a professor in the Department of English and chair of the Department of Linguistics at UW-Madison, is also part of the Wisconsin English Project, founded in 2006. The program focuses on documenting and studying grammatical, social and cultural language variation in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest.

While it’s unclear when “Up North” was first used, it has grown into a common part of the state’s lexicon but with variations on an exact meaning.