A traveller in Northumberland once went home convinced the locals slept with pigs to keep warm. Someone had offered him a piggy for his bed, and he assumed the worst.

That is the North East in one story. The words sound like English, but plenty of them mean something else entirely, and a few go all the way back to Old English. This is 20 words only North East people understand, from a piggy in the bed to the clarts at the back door, a nose you call a neb, a splinter you call a spelk, and a saint's nickname that ended up meaning a donkey, a pit pony, a left hand and a duck. And from number seven, every word leads back to the coal that built the region.

Along the way: why aye has no known origin, why a fisherman's gansey couldn't really identify the drowned, how the keelmen built their own hospital in 1701, and why bait, the North East word for a packed lunch, outlived the last deep mine.