CHAV or charv?

Travel outside the region and a “young person characterised by loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style sportswear” is a ‘chav’.

But not if you’re from Tyneside though.

Geordies will argue the term was born here and should always be pronounced ‘charv’.

Now help is at hand in the form of a pioneering website set to put an end to such disputes.

This week’s relaunch of the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) online service will provide users with an opportunity to further understand the history of our dialect.

Not only does it confirm that ‘charver’ is of North East origin, it reveals it was first used in 1997.

The site’s new Historical Thesaurus also reveals the term “Geordie” first appeared in 1786 as another term for a guinea.

It was not until the following century the word became synonymous with Tyneside residents.

Skip forward two hundred years and across to Wearside, and it seems Toon fans actually coined the word ‘Mackems’.

Sunderland soccer stars were first described with the word in a 1980 issue of Newcastle United’s magazine, Magpie.

Not even the law has escaped the test of time. Popular slang for police ‘polis’ first cropped up in the refined surroundings of an 1892 Rudyard Kipling book, which read: “They sent the polis there, the English were too drunk to know, the Irish didn’t care.”

Dr Adam Mearns, Research Associate at Newcastle University’s School of English Language, Literature and Linguistics, said: “Details of what the language was like in the past help us to understand how and why English is the way it is.

“Local examples include well-known Northern terms like ‘bairn’ as well as more obscure words like ‘lake’, meaning ‘play’, which has nothing to do with the modern word meaning ‘body of water’.

“In fact, it relates to an Old English word ‘lacan’ meaning ‘to play’.”

The new dictionary website details an array of long-forgotten Tyneside terms, including ‘rolley’, a ‘truck without sides’ used in the mining industry.

And at the pit in 1825 you would go to a ‘netty’, or an outdoor lavatory.

And to keep your bed warm in the same era you may have owned a ‘piggy’, a type of ceramic hot water bottle.

Dr Mearns said: “As well as being lost words can change their meaning.

One example is ‘neb’, which local people take to mean ‘nosy’. There appears to have been a change in the principal meaning of the word with a shift from ‘nose’ to ‘sticking your nose into someone else’s business’.”

As Christmas approaches the idleness of the text message generation could be blamed for calling it ‘Crimbo’. In fact, the word fist appeared in 1928, long before the rise of the mobile phone.