[n 1] In 1967, the Caribbean Association of Headmasters and Headmistresses, recognising 'the inadecuacy of imported British and American dictionaries,' resolved to 'request the appropriate department of the University of the West Indies to compile a list of lexical items in each territory and to circulate these to schools for the guidance of teachers.

[2][n 3] In order to build a proper regional dictionary from said collection, Allsopp founded the Caribbean Lexicography Project in 1971 at Cave Hill, Barbados, with Ford Foundation funding.

[4] The completed manuscript was submitted to Oxford University Press in 1992, where it underwent a number of revisions over the next three years.

[5] The DCEU is a descriptive, rather than historical, dictionary, in that it is 'not a chronicle of [the Caribbean's] linguistic past, but a careful account of what is current.

'[6] Despite this, it is also a prescriptive dictionary, in that it '[omits] the mass of Caribbean basilectal vocabulary and idiom in favour of the mesolectal and acrolectal, and [uses] a hierarchy of formalness in status-labelling the entries throughout.