In a post last week, I presented data on lexical variation for "sunset" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies in response to Daylight Savings Time rearing its ugly head once again. This week, I take a look at lexical variation for "sunrise" in the same collection. The results for a prompt approximating "What do you call it when the sun comes up?" are presented in the figure below:

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

As the figure shows, sunrise was the most common response to the question, followed by dawn, sunup, and then several low-frequency items. Compared to the earlier list of "sunset" variants, the list of "sunrise" variants is long, but this may be an effect of "sunset" being the second of the two prompts, and thus informants being primed as to what the fieldworker was looking for. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that in response to this prompt informants offered dawn as the second-ranking response rather than sunup, whereas sundown and dusk are the second- and third-ranking responses, respectively, for the "sunset" question. Furthermore, although neither dawn nor dusk challenge the leading variants for their respective questions, dawn is offered a relatively substantial number of times for "sunrise" (n=9), while dusk is only offered three times for "sunset."

For a word search of all the variants for both the "sunrise" and "sunset" questions, click here.