Dictionary of American Regional English

""DARE is a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary."" The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a record of American English as spoken in the United States, from its beginnings to the present. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not document the standard language used throughout the country. Instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that we learn from our families and friends rather than from our teachers and books. For DARE, a ""region"" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most (but not all) of the country.The Dictionary is based both on face-to-face interviews with 2,777 people carried out in 1,002 communities across the country between 1965 and 1970, and on a large collection of print and (recently) electronic materials, including diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, government documents, and newspapers. These sources are cited in individual entries to illustrate how the words have been used from the 17th century through the beginning of the 21st century. Entries may include pronunciations, variant forms, etymologies, and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms.Five volumes of text were published by Harvard University Press between 1985 and 2012: Volume I (A–C), edited by Frederic G. Cassidy, appeared in 1985; Volume II (D–H), edited by Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, was published in 1991; Volume III (I–O), by Cassidy and Hall, came out in 1996; Volume IV (P–Sk), by Hall, appeared in 2002; and Volume V (Sl–Z), with Hall as editor, finished the set in 2012. A sixth volume, subtitled “Contrastive Maps, Index to Entry Labels, Questionnaire, and Fieldwork Data,” edited by Hall with Luanne von Schneidemesser, was published early in 2013. Late that same year, the digital version was launched.DARE chronicles the language of the American people. It is used by teachers, librarians, researchers, physicians, forensic linguists, journalists, historians, and playwrights.