DARE’s coverage is immense; all of the familiar regional questions are here, including Minnesota variations as depicted in “Fargo.” Photograph by Working Title/ Polygram / Shutterstock

Americans tend to think that we’re a pretty homogeneous nation, in terms of our vocabulary. Yes, there are Southern drawls, and there’s Boston and Brooklyn and Appalachia and Minnesota, but the words themselves, we believe, are pretty much the same. But there are often significant regional differences, and these are beautifully explicated in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the six-volume study of America’s dialects, affectionately known as DARE.

There’s nothing terribly mysterious about the process of writing a dictionary. You figure out what you want to include, research it, and then write it up. But there are a lot of ways to do your research. If your subject is ancient Greek, you read everything there is, organize your words, and look at every example. If your subject is dialect, the problem is to figure out how people say things, and what people call things, in places that may not be that easy to get to. Several nineteenth-century projects, most notably the English Dialect Dictionary, managed this by sending surveys through the post and hoping to get useful answers back. A modern option is to remain in one’s office and telephone people around the country, the process used by the Atlas of North American English (which focusses almost entirely on pronunciation). The other obvious thing to do is go everywhere in person. In the late nineteenth century, Edmond Edmont rode by bicycle around France, and corners of Belgium and Switzerland, conducting seven hundred interviews to research what became the Atlas Linguistique de la France.

When DARE began its fieldwork, in 1965, its teams travelled in “Word Wagons”: campers outfitted with detailed surveys, recording equipment, and linguistics graduate students. The wagons travelled to more than a thousand communities, which were not always ready to welcome sixteen-hundred-question surveys, massive reel-to-reel tape recorders, or graduate students. But they persevered, completing almost three thousand interviews, with a total of 2.3 million answers that were keyboarded in a prominent early example of the value of computing in the humanities. Recordings of the interviews, and of a story called “Arthur the Rat,” which was written to elicit important pronunciation features, show the variation in speech sounds. This fieldwork, combined with extensive original textual research, formed the core of the dictionary, which was ultimately published from 1985 to 2013.

The purpose of DARE is to “document the words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from region to region in the United States”; it also explores social variations—for example, African-American Vernacular English. The history of DARE goes back to 1889, at the founding of the American Dialect Society, one of the major goals of which was to produce a dictionary of American dialects. But as with many large-scale scholarly projects, it took several decades of unsystematic and abortive work before Frederic G. Cassidy, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, developed and tested his extensive questionnaire addressing terms for weather, courtship, farming, health, money, religion, food, and more. When this proved successful, funding was secured to begin the fieldwork in earnest. After the Word Wagons returned home, the computerized survey results allowed editors to categorize the answers based on the speakers’ age, sex, ethnicity, education, and urban-versus-rural upbringing.

Much coverage of DARE focusses on the “funny” words—this magazine included Volume V in its Best Books of 2012 list, with the note, “If you want to play ring-a-levio or pom pom pullaway with a schnickelfritz, you need this book.” But as with the occasional wry definitions in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, of 1755 (“lexicographer . . . a harmless drudge”), to focus on these words misses the point. DARE gives serious treatment to a massive corpus of prominent terms, only a few of which are evocative names for heavy rainstorms. The coverage is immense; all of the familiar regional questions are here: “pop” versus “soda”; waiting “on line” (as New Yorkers do) versus “in line”; the distribution of “hero,” “hoagie,” “grinder,” “Cuban,” “submarine,” and “torpedo” as names of long sandwiches; the pronunciation of “ask” as “ax”—all with extensive quotations from the surveys and from American literature illustrating them.

Putting the dictionary online has given easy access to the entire range of questions, and the pleasure of reading them is hard to overstate. As Joan Hall, who took over the editorship after Cassidy’s death, in 2000, noted, “If you select Boats and Sailing topic and then click on the first question, you’re taken to the map with all the responses for a small rowboat. When you get to dinghy, batteau, johnboat, skify, dinky, pram, punt, pirogue, dock boat, etc., and click on each one and see great regional patterns, you think, ‘My gosh! I had no idea!’ And that happens over and over again. The differences in vocabulary can still amaze.” And earlier this year, the entire set of recordings from the fieldwork were placed online, allowing everyone to hear “Arthur the Rat” from a thousand communities around the country.

It’s no wonder that DARE has been lauded since its inception; William Safire called it “the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century.” As Hall observed, “People are invariably fascinated. When they hear examples from their region which differ from elsewhere, they say, ‘What? My language is normal, they’re weird!’ Whenever I have radio shows, we get tons of call-ins from people talking about their language.”

While discussions of dialect often focus on old-fashioned subjects such as terms for cowsheds, or names of different kinds of fishing equipment, the lexicon of the modern urban world shows regional variation as well. The device used to control a TV set from the couch can be called a “zapper,” “clicker,” “remote,” “flipper,” “switcher,” and dozens more. The cardboard sleeve that wraps around a takeout coffee cup to insulate one’s hand from the heat is known as a “sleeve,” “collar,” “jacket,” “zarf,” “cozy,” “clutch”. Pronunciations also change over time; the notion that Americans all want to sound like a TV newscaster, and that this will lead to uniformity in our speech, is a myth; Americans generally want to sound like their neighbors, and the evidence shows clearly that major dialect regions are actually diverging.

Since the completion of the dictionary, the DARE editors have been updating existing entries, designing a new language survey—fewer cowsheds and rowboats, more remote controls and coffee cups. A pilot project yielded fascinating results; the editors discovered a previously undiscussed word for cutting a place in line, “budge,” localized in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. But the project proved difficult; people responded very well to personal interviews, but these were impractical on a limited budget. “For any real new progress, political winds will need to change,” Hall ruefully said. Sadly, this week the lexicographic community learned that DARE would be shutting down.

DARE was primarily supported by grants, especially from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In recent years, small individual donations played an increasing role in the project’s funding. The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to “Z.” The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize. Squeaking by on royalties and individual gifts, and with several editors working on a volunteer basis, the dictionary was able to publish some quarterly updates, but by the beginning of the coming year, it will be necessary to lay off the staff.

Now the hundreds of boxes of files are going into the University of Wisconsin archives, after some last-minute work to insure that the most important records are indexed properly. Editors will try to keep some visibility—continuing to do radio interviews, for example—but this will also be on a mostly volunteer basis.