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- The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE or Dictionary) is a record of American English as spoken in the United States, from its beginning up to the present. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not record the standard language used throughout the country; instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that we learn from our families and friends rather than from our teachers and books. For DARE a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most of the country, as long as the particular feature is not found in the standard language of the entire country. 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, such as diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, government documents, and newspapers. These materials are cited in individual entries to illustrate how the words have been used from the seventeenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first. The entries may include pronunciations, variant forms, etymologies, and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms. The first four volumes of DARE, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1985-2002, eds. Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall), cover the letters A-Sk. Volume V (Sl-Z) is projected to be completed in 2010. A sixth volume will follow with comprehensive background material (as more fully explained below) as will an electronic edition. DARE is a record of the language of the American people, reflecting all the richness and diversity of our history and culture. It is used by teachers, librarians, researchers, physicians, forensic linguists, journalists, historians, and playwrights, as well as by readers who simply love language.
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