It’s finally finished. Since 1965, linguists, lexicographers, and wordsmiths have been waiting for the editors of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), charting under-the-radar regional language nationwide, to reach the end of the alphabet. They gifted us with the fifth and final volume last year, and now the whole thing is available online.

There is a delightful muchness in it. The standard dictionary necessarily focuses on what we all say, but it should not disqualify a word as English if only some of us say it. DARE is a much different English than we are used to seeing gathered in one place. From 1965 to 1970, the editor and his staff covered 1,002 communities nationwide, asking 2,777 people what they called 1,847 various items. The finished DARE contains 60,000 words and 2,985 maps. Tabulating all of the data was so gargantuan a task that the original editor didn’t even live to see the project completed.

It was worth the wait. Only from DARE can we learn that, across this great nation, dust bunnies have been referred to with a dazzling array of terms such as fooskies, ghost manure, rich relatives, cussywop, and more colorfully, pussy, slut’s wool, and yes, negro wool as well. Things get almost poetic with souls and even men, and my favorite is the apparently rather taciturn upstate New Yorker who gave the local term as type of fuzz.

Elsewhere, one has found the Georgian term for firefly third shift mosquito, and the South Carolinian whose response to “What do you say to make a horse go faster?” was “Whip the hell out of him.” Pimples, predictably for something intimate and annoying, go under a major array of colorful terms: festers, hinkeys, pimps, Canadian perjunkety, cat boils, pep-jinnies, and fuck bumps (?). Some areas get creative with even the better-known terms, such as those in Washington State who have called them zids and those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and elsewhere who have spoken of acme.

However, the volume does suffer from something inherent to such projects: Lingo is evanescent. By the time you capture terms like this between two covers, they are often obsolete. This is one reason why DARE, in all of its majesty, cannot help but qualify as an achievement more archival than lexicographic. Because of its regional focus, as well as the homogenization of American English, DARE’s long gestation has brought it to light in a world where we process language differently than people did in the "Mad Men" era that DARE was created in. Although DARE is supplemented with references to written sources from after 1970, the work is essentially a record of American regionalisms such as they were in Eisenhower-era America. The staff even preferred to interview people 60 or older, who had lived long lives in their communities soaking up the local language.