The New Year brings a happy present for lovers of the American language: Volume IV of the massive Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is hot off the press.

If you have not met DARE, let me introduce you. It is not like any other dictionary you ever saw. It is not a reference work to be consulted every day. Its several volumes may sit on a shelf for months and never yield their riches to a curious eye — but I can tell you, it is a comfort to have DARE there.

The project dates from 1889, when the American Dialect Society began to publish its Dialect Notes. In 1906, William E. Mead, a leading lexicographer, published his vision of “a dialect map of our vast country.” Encouraged by occasional spurts of interest, the idea lay fallow for almost 60 years until the late Fred Cassidy of the University of Wisconsin emerged to give it substance. He proposed nothing less than a dictionary-cum-atlas of everyday words and phrases — a permanent record of how Americans were speaking in the second half of the 20th century.

Cassidy and his associates set to work in Madison on a questionnaire that would serve from coast to coast. They finally settled on a list of 1,847 questions divided into 41 categories. The first group of questions had to do with time, e.g., “What do you call the time when the sun first comes into sight?” The second covered the weather: “What do you call a sudden, very heavy rain?”

On down the line, the questionnaire inquired into the words we use for such tangible items as furniture, utensils, foods, farm animals, vehicles, wildflowers and clothing. There were questions on body parts, family relationships, courtship and marriage. Category CC asked about religion, EE dealt with children’s games, HH for types of people, e.g., “What do you call a person who likes to brag?”

While the questionnaire was being worked out, Cassidy and his small staff made out a list of 1,000 representative communities, large and small, from Maine to California. They trained 80 field workers, most of them graduate students, in the interviewing art and sent them on the road. By 1970 a mountain of raw data was on hand — 2.5 million responses, carefully codified by region. Work began on the maps that would accompany terms of exceptional interest. In cooperation with the Belknap Press of Harvard University, the task of intricate typesetting went forward. And all the time, money had to be raised.

In 1985 the first volume of DARE at last appeared. It covered only the letters A through C. This was a typical entry: The question put to a respondent was, “A joking way of saying you would not know someone is to say, ‘I wouldn’t know him from ——.”‘ The question stirred up the same answer across the Gulf Coast: “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s housecat” (or Adam’s hat, or Adam’s hatband).

Remarkably, respondents on the West Coast had a different way of completing the sentence: “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s off-ox” (or Adam’s brother, Adam’s foot, Adam’s monkey, the devil’s off-ox).

The newly published Volume IV, with Joan Houston Hall as chief editor, is a browser’s delight. My eye fell upon “pilau,” also known as “perloo,” a tasty combination of chicken, shrimp, bacon and rice. The accompanying map suggests that no one west of the Mississippi ever met perloo, but it is very big down in the wiregrass country.

Some terms are more national than regional. When someone snores, he “saws logs” across the whole length and breadth of the country. Some terms are tightly confined; a card game known as “sheepshead” turned up only in Wisconsin and Ohio. Played on the streets of New York, hopscotch is “potsy.” In Massachusetts in 1915, an impertinent girl was called “a little saucebox.” Dipping into DARE is like eating peanuts.

Volume V, scheduled for 2005, will complete the basic series. At least one supplementary book is in the works. Meanwhile, all you language lovers out there could consider giving DARE to your local school or public library. A future browser would have the pleasure of learning, as I just learned, that in the Southeast a bad-tempered person is “rantankerous.” I used to be that way myself.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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