How to Actually Use the Dictionary of American Regional English
The DARE project started in the 1960s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and it took them over 40 years to publish all six volumes plus the online database. Most people I talk to assume it's just a list of funny Southern words, which is a serious misunderstanding of what it actually contains. The questionnaire phase alone involved 2,800 fieldworkers traveling across every state interviewing more than 10,000 people, specifically targeting those who'd lived in their communities for most of their lives. These were people with strong regional speech patterns, not people who'd moved around recently. I ran into a real problem with this while working on a dialect translation project last year. I needed to track down the origin of a phrase someone used that I'd never heard before, something like "fixin' to" but regionally specific in a way my standard dictionaries couldn't pinpoint. I went straight to the DARE online database and filtered by the Gulf Coast region, then looked at the headwords under "geese." One of the entries pointed me to a variant I'd never seen recorded anywhere else, and it came with audio from the original interview. The exact workaround was to use the cross-reference feature between the print volumes and the online recordings, because the print version sometimes lists regional information but doesn't include the full audio context that helps you understand actual usage. Most people miss one important thing about DARE. It's not organized alphabetically in a way that helps you find what you need. The six printed volumes are arranged by headword, but a single headword entry can span multiple pages and references are spread across the volume set. The online database at dare.wisc.edu fixed this with search functionality, but even then the entries are surprisingly dense with cross-references that assume you already know how the system works.
Another thing nobody tells you is that DARE deliberately included entries that sound quaint or outdated to modern ears, because the project's goal was documenting regional speech as it existed at the time of each interview, not what people think regional speech should sound like. When you're researching a word and the entry seems oddly specific, it probably is. Those details usually come from actual oral history material that the original fieldworkers collected. The online database has a few quirks you should know about. The search function allows Boolean operators and you can filter by region, county, and interview date, which is genuinely useful if you need to narrow down data from a specific area or time period. But the audio player has some latency issues, and the full transcription isn't always available for older interviews, which means you might be working from abbreviated field notes rather than complete records. For serious research this is manageable but frustrating, especially when you're trying to catch subtle pronunciation differences between speakers from neighboring counties. I've also found that the project's definition style can be confusing at first. DARE entries don't define words in the traditional sense, they present usage notes, variant spellings, and regional maps showing distribution. So if you're looking up a word expecting a clean dictionary definition, you might be disappointed until you adjust your expectations about what regional documentation actually is.
The main limitation is that DARE's data cuts off roughly around the 1990s for the final publication, and language continues to shift. Some regional distinctions have disappeared entirely since then, while new ones have emerged. If you're researching contemporary dialect variation, you'll need to supplement DARE with more recent sociolinguistic studies, because the dictionary alone won't capture what's happened in the last three decades. It's still the single best resource for understanding where American regional speech came from, but it isn't a complete picture of where it is now. If you need to access it, the full text and audio recordings are available free at dare.wisc.edu. The print set is expensive if you're buying used, but university libraries almost always carry a copy, and the online version covers essentially everything including the supplementary volumes that came out after the main six.
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