In today's post, I look at variants of "God" that were elicited from native English speakers in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. These terms were elicited during a set of questions on church life of the form "What is the name of the being who one prays to at church?" The quantitative distribution is illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Fig. 1: Variants of "God" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau; www.wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, "God" was the most frequent response, by far, but many other variants were also offered, often as additional responses to follow-up questions. Some of these variants appear as the inevitable, perhaps, result of the concept of the Holy Trinity, in which any of the three components can be selected for. Many of the answers also offer a view of this concept as masculine and patriarchal.

A word search comprising the words and phrases from this analysis can be found here.

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