In a post earlier this week, I presented variants of "God" that were offered by informants in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. Today, I look at variants of "devil" that were elicited primarily through two types of questions: One asking the name of the ruler of the underworld and the other inquiring about a costume consisting of a pitchfork, a tail, and horns that might be worn on Halloween. These questions elicited the following responses:

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

As shown, devil, or, more accurately, (the) devil(s), is the highest-ranking variant of "devil" in the collection, with Satan lagging far behind in second place. Two of the oncers are noteworthy: Frasz was elicited from an informant who said he learned it from his Czechoslovakian mother; Hussein is apparently in reference to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, as the interview was conducted around the time of Desert Storm, in 1990.

Comparatively, the variable "devil" resulted in few variants, as opposed to the 24 variants that were tallied for "God." One of the possible reasons for this quantitative difference is that different faiths have varied names for God, and there are also variants that appear in various genres, such as hymns, sermons, and texts, the same does not hold true for the devil, which remains relatively constant among the faiths and across genres.

For a word search on these variants, click here.

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