In anticipation of Halloween 2016, my next few posts will look at lexical variants of entities associated with the holiday. I begin by looking at responses that were asked of informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, generally through two questions, both targeting the same response: 1) What do you call inhabitants of haunted houses? and 2) What is a costume you see a lot on Halloween in which a person throws a sheet over their head? Responses appear in the figure below.

Figure 1: Variants of ghost in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Figure 1: Variants of *ghost* in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As shown in the figure, ghost(s) was by far the most frequent response for this item. However, the dataset is not without its surprises, most notably, perhaps, borillas and union soldier. Other lexical variables that were elicited in the study and that relate semantically to this dataset include cemetery and devil, and will be posted on later this week as the celebration ramps up.

You can find a word search for these terms by clicking here.

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