By 1970, the questionnaires were completed. The editors’ next task was to make a dictionary out of the results, enriched by illustrative citations fleshing out every word’s history. Cassidy originally hoped to see DARE finished in time for the country’s bicentennial in 1976. But the first volume, covering A through C, wasn’t published until 1985, and the editors were still slogging away when Cassidy died in 2000.
Now the fifth and final volume is upon us, from slab to zydeco. Earlier this month, Joan Houston Hall, who took over as chief editor of DARE after Cassidy’s death, brought a copy of the long-awaited Volume V to the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in Portland, Ore. When she revealed it to the assembled language scholars, the excitement was palpable. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, shared the exultant news on Twitter: “DARE is complete, A-zydeco! Yay!”
The celebration was justified. DARE stands alone as the most exhaustive record of regional speech in America, each page bursting with geographically nuanced information about the country’s diverse lexicon. It’s a joy to page through: Where else would you learn that snuff for chewing is called snoose in the Pacific Northwest, and also goes by the name Swedish condition powder?
Though DARE is finally done, with Volume V officially publishing in March, the varied language of Americans marches on. How can DARE avoid becoming a relic? It’s a substantial challenge of capturing something as dynamic as American dialects: No single historical snapshot can really do it justice, especially one trapped on the printed page.
To address these concerns, Harvard University Press is planning an online interactive edition of the dictionary, slated to launch next year. And if Hall has her way, the work of DARE will continue, with a return to the communities that the fieldworkers visited with their Word Wagons.
