Anchoring the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay is the Hampton Roads region. With both the Bay and the Atlantic Ocean lapping at its shores, this area of beaches and tidal wetlands also happens to be home to more than 1.5 million people.

As a visitor or newcomer to Hampton Roads your mind will be boggled by all the terms you hear to describe this area--Southeastern Virginia, Hampton Roads, Tidewater, Southside, South Hampton Roads and Virginia Peninsula. To add to the confusion, residents often use specific names of the nine cities and six counties that make up this vast region. In recent years a regional tourism marketing campaign has blanketed the East Coast with advertisements for Virginia's Waterfront. That's yet another term for this region.

Ask residents where they're from and you'll get a boatload of answers depending on the circumstances. If they're in Illinois or New York, they'll probably say "southeastern Virginia." If they're visiting Roanoke, Richmond or some other part of Virginia, they might say "Hampton Roads." If the question is asked at the opera, a corporate meeting or elsewhere in the region, the answer is likely to be "Portsmouth," "Virginia Beach" or another specific locality.

All the terminology is accurate. But in today's politically correct times there are some names for this 2,499-square-mile region that are more correct than others.

Geographically, this is southeastern Virginia. Officially, it is the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). This is the 27th most populous MSA in the country and the largest MSA between Washington and Atlanta. Hampton Roads is bigger than San Antonio but smaller than the Milwaukee/Racine metropolitan area. Our population is greater than that of 13 states.

Until 1983 the region was broken into two MSAs--South Hampton Roads and the Virginia Peninsula. The two areas are physically divided by the James River and the body of water known as Hampton Roads. To some extent, residents feel loyalty to one side or the other. However, that is changing as residents live in one city, work in another and shop in a third locality. Although city officials can be pretty territorial about protecting their turf, they are starting to hop on the regionalism bandwagon. In 1996 representatives from 10 area localities formed the Hampton Roads Partnership to plot ways to improve the entire region. Also in 1996, a class of Leadership Hampton Roads, a program that grooms future civic leaders, convinced all area cities to add a new tagline to their city limits signs that proclaims them to be: "A Hampton Roads Community." After initial skepticism, area cities eagerly tacked up the new regional designation.

The politically correct term for this region is Hampton Roads. In the 17th century this name was given to the body of water where the James, Elizabeth and Nansemond Rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay to form the world's finest deep-water harbor. The name "Hampton" honors Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who supported the colonization of Virginia in the early 17th century.

In past decades, the term "Tidewater" was frequently used for this coastal plain and the adjacent regions that stretch along the York and James Rivers. But in recent years as area cities promoted the region, the name "Tidewater" has been discouraged since it conjures up images of mud flats and brackish water. However, the region's native accent is still called a Tidewater accent. The classic example of this accent is the phrase ''out and about the house'', in which the first, middle and last words rhyme with boat.

In the 1980s, economic developers began touting "Hampton Roads'' as the name for the entire region, which includes Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Virginia Beach on the south side of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. To the north are Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson, Williamsburg and the counties of James City, Gloucester and York. In 1993 the MSA expanded to include Isle of Wight County on the south side, Mathews County on the Peninsula, and nearby Currituck County, North Carolina. Since 1990 all the region's mail has been postmarked with "Hampton Roads" rather than the names of individual cities and counties.

For more than a decade, Hampton Roads has ranked second to northern Virginia as the state's fastest growing region. It has six of the state's 10 largest cities, and Virginia Beach is No. 1 in population. Chesapeake in recent years has become one of the country's fastest-growing cities with its array of new neighborhoods, retail centers and industrial parks.

The region, which is crisscrossed by a half-dozen major rivers, feels more unified today than it did 12 years ago. Tunnel crossings link cities separated by rivers, and longtime tolls on roads connecting the cities have been eliminated. The last toll disappeared in 1995. Today it's common for residents to commute to work through a tunnel from Suffolk to Newport News or from Hampton to Virginia Beach. In 1994 another barrier to regionalism fell when long-distance charges were removed between the southside and the Peninsula and Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. In 1997 the entire region gained its own area code, 757.

To simplify matters for this guide, which concentrates on the five Southside cities, we'll use the names of specific cities if possible. When talking about the region, we'll call it Hampton Roads.