As illustrated by my earlier posts on dogs of mixed breed and orphan lambs, variants of animal terms hold an important place in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR). In today's post, I look at variation in terms used to talk about male horses in LAMR interviews. As shown in the figure below, three terms figure prominently in this discussion, followed by a secondary term, and then several oncers.

Fig. 1: Distribution of terms for "male horse" in LAMR (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As shown, the highest-ranking variant is gelding, which is used without competition by any other term for 'castrated male horse.' Stallion and stud (and to a lesser extent the related variant stud horse) compete as a term for male horses that can be used for breeding purposes, or, as one informant put it, a horse that could be thought of as an original. In addition, one Colorado informant supplied several Spanish terms to the discussion, including gadinyo, which he reported having the same meaning as stallion.

With respect to the distribution of stallion and stud in LAMR, as the figure suggests, there was a great deal of overlap with their uses, with 21 informants reporting using both variants. Furthermore, they reported using these terms interchangeably, that is, with no distinction in meaning, although several informants noted that stud could also be used as a part of speech other than noun, as in "They bring them to stud..." (Meeteetse, Wyoming). Stallion, on the other hand, was not reported as filling any grammatical role other than noun by informants.

Although no differences in meaning were offered by informants, there were apparently differences in the social distribution of stallion and stud. For instance, some informants reported using the variant stallion more than stud when in the presence of women. There were also some differences in usage by informant sex as well, as 20 women reported using stallion and 14 stud, whereas 18 men used stallion and 17 stud. Such numbers do perhaps suggest differences in how these terms are used by men and women; however, the numbers did not undergo statistical testing.

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