Dictionary of American Regional English

Dictionary of American Regional English, Frederick G. Cassidy, ed. (1985—2002).

Few aspects of language are more interesting than its relentless changeability—its capacity to grow ever more nuanced and particular with humanity’s highly situational, episodic efforts to make reality represent-able. As a result, we have all heard words that were spoken—seemingly in American English, our native tongue—that we had no sense for and could not locate in a standard dictionary. These words included regionalisms: words peculiar to a part of the country. The Dictionary of American Regional English represents the culmination of an enormous project—inaugurated with the American Dialect Society’s founding in 1889—to collect, understand, publish and preserve the beautiful diversity of regional English in the United States. The first volume of the “DARE” was published in 1985, the second in 1991, the third in 1996, the fourth in 2002, and the fifth and final volume is forthcoming in 2009. The dictionary was compiled using extensive fieldwork and a questionnaire that asked 1,847 basic questions about time, weather, topography, houses, furniture, utensils, dishes, foods, fruits, vegetables, courtship, celebrations, emotional states, disease, exclamations, and so on. The result is a monumental and intriguing work that every student and scholar should be familiar with. Words as superficial straightforward as “rag” can be discovered to have a wide range of fascinating usages, such as: “To surpass all others,” (as in “I can take the rag off”); “To start working” (as in, “Take the rag out and do a day’s work”); “A paper dollar”; “To tease”; “A fight”; et cetera.

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