As university research projects go, compiling the Dictionary of American Regional English was a challenging and sometimes hazardous one: It took more than four decades, and thousands of interviews, conducted by researchers who were sometimes chased out of rural communities by suspicious locals.
Finally, though, their monumental effort to chart the idiosyncrasies of regional speech in the US is, as they might say in the south, fixin’ to be done.
The final volume, covering the letters S to Z – and revealing, at long last, the meaning of the Maine word “whiffle-minded” (vacillating) – has received a government grant that should see it being published by the end of next year, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who have been working on the dictionary since 1965.