Instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that are learned from family and friends rather than from teachers and books.
[3] 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.
A sixth volume, subtitled "Contrastive Maps, Index to Entry Labels, Questionnaire, and Fieldwork Data," edited by Hall with Luanne von Schneidemesser serving as Senior Editor, was published early in 2013.
[5] Cassidy had done fieldwork in Wisconsin for the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States project and in Jamaica for his Dictionary of Jamaican English.
[5] Drawing on this experience, he and Duckert made plans for a nationwide, fieldworker-administered questionnaire that would provide a comprehensive foundation for the projected Dictionary.
These resources included historical and contemporary newspapers, diaries, letters, histories, biographies, novels, and government documents.
[8] As the fieldworkers sent their questionnaires back to Madison, the approximately 2.3 million answers were keypunched, and software was written to create a question-by-question tabulation of responses as well as an index.
Because Cassidy had contracted to supply the text of the Dictionary on magnetic tape fully coded for typesetting, with camera-ready maps, a production department had to be set up.
(Starting with Volume IV, digital libraries provided many valuable resources for expanding the historical coverage of the entries.)
Volume VI (2013) includes more than 1,700 maps showing contrastive distributions of regional synonyms (such as hero, hoagie, grinder, sub, torpedo, poor boy, and Cuban, all of which describe a sandwich in a long bun), as well as social distributions of regional terms (by age, sex, race, education, and community type).
The first volume also includes 156 pages of introductory matter, with an extensive introduction, an explanation of DARE's regions and maps, an essay on how language changes, a guide to pronunciation, text of the questionnaire, and a list of informants (showing where and when they were interviewed, the community type, the person's age, sex, race, occupation, education, and whether the person made an audiotape).
The maps are adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area, so they look a bit strange at first, but one learns to "read" them quickly.
If the evidence from the fieldwork shows that a term is used disproportionately frequently by a particular social group (based on age, sex, race, education, or community type), a "social" label such as "old-fash[ioned]," "chiefly among women," or "esp[ecially] freq[uent] among Black speakers" will also be applied.
Fieldworkers were asked to weight their selection of informants toward older people in an effort to collect words for objects and practices that were going out of use.
[13] The DARE questionnaire included a total of 1,847 questions; some that proved not to be fruitful in the early interviews were dropped, with others being added in their place.
The use of the reading passage, a contrived story called "Arthur the Rat" that was designed to elicit all significant pronunciation variants in American English, allows comparison of sounds in the same context from places all across the country.
The use of free conversation elicited the introduction of topics not covered in the questionnaire, resulting in a corpus of informal speech that can be contrasted to the formal style of the reading passage.
[15] In addition, samples of informal conversation from the DARE audiotapes may be heard at "American Languages: Our Nation's Many Voices Online" website.
Beginning in summer 2015, DARE staff members began publishing quarterly updates on the project website.
[20] On 5 November 2017, Douglas Belkin, in The Wall Street Journal, reported that the Dictionary of American Regional English "has rung the knell, sugared off, finished out the row", meaning it is shutting down, closing shop.