Essex girl
noun · first attested 1990s
Essex campaigners asked the Oxford English Dictionary to delete this phrase, and were refused.
A pejorative stereotype of a young woman from Essex as vacuous, promiscuous and materialistic.
51.7500°N 0.5833°E · Q23240
Record
- Relationship
- Named from the place
- Confidence
- Well attestedThe place link is the standard scholarly account.
- Attested
- 1990s
- Part of speech
- noun
Explanations here are written for this atlas. Dictionary text is not copied; the sources are linked so the claim can be checked.
- Step 1
Essex
- In English
Essex girl
The stereotype spread through joke books and tabloid columns in the early 1990s, alongside the Essex man coined in 1990. In 2016 a petition from Essex women asked the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the entry; the OED declined, on the grounds that dictionaries record usage rather than approve of it. It belongs to a long English habit of naming stock characters after places, beside Covent Garden nun and Sloane Ranger.