One part of the house that has received ample attention in interviews for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada has been the fireplace, as worksheets for the project include questions designed to elicit regional variants in several components of the fireplace, including the mantel, hearth, and chimney. One fireplace question, in particular, focuses on terms denoting the item that the wood is burned on in the fireplace. In the eastern states, Kurath (1949) designated andirons as the headword for this item, reporting on its general distribution in the North, in coastal areas in the MIdland region, and in Southern cities. But he also pointed to several regional variants, including firedogs, dogs, and dog irons in the South, South Midland, and western Pennsylvania, and firedogs in a more scattered term distribution throughout non-western Pennsylvania and New England. Kurath also mentioned the status of hand irons as a folk variant in regions where andirons was well established. (For more on terms used for this in the eastern states, see this post by Dr. Allison Burkette.)

The andiron question remained in play in worksheets for the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States, and the answers that were elicited by the question in the Middle Rockies (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) are shown in the figure below.

Fig. 1: Distribution of variants of andiron in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 1: Distribution of variants of *andiron* in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

While some LAMR informants reported using andirons, or the closely related variant endirons, grates was the more common response to this question. In part this was due to many informants professing to having greater familiarity with cook stoves rather than fireplaces, especially while growing up, due to having limited supplies of firewood in the area and/or requiring the greater heating efficiency that a stove offered. Although it is the case, then, that some informants provided the variant grate when talking about a part of a stove rather than a fireplace, several seemed simply to transfer the name of the part of one to the other, and in the process neglected words that had been more commonly used in the eastern U.S. for the same artifact.

For a word search on terms for andirons in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, click here.

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