Today marks this year's winter solstice, and so, just as they did last week, this blogger's thoughts once again turn to fire. In this post, I present responses to the question of "What materials do you use to start a fire?" which was posed to informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. Focusing on the wood that was used, rather than on such answers as "a match," "paper," and "gasoline -- lots and lots of gasoline," I arrived at the following dataset:

As expected, the most common answer was kindling, and even those informants who offered a different variant of it admitted to knowing and/or using the term. However, several informants reported chips, chippings, and shavings as the terms they would naturally use for wood used at the initial stages of building a fire.

And if this blog got you thinking about a fire, without having the fireplace or pit with which to enjoy one, try this:

For a word search comprising variants of "kindling" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, click here.