In American English, an Easterner is a person from the eastern United States, especially the Northeast — the states north of Washington, D.C., such as New York, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania. That is the tidy dictionary picture. Though actually, people use the word a little loosely. Someone from the East Coast in general might be called an Easterner, while someone from Georgia or Florida is more often called a Southerner, even though those states also sit in the east of the map. The line is more about how people live and how they sound than a fence on the ground. The word is often written with a capital E when it means this US group, like a label. Outside the US, easterner (often with a small e) can simply mean a person from the east of whichever country you are talking about, but it is not a word you will meet every day. It is about where a person is from. It is not which way they are travelling, and it is not a thing that sits furthest east.