America’s Great Dictionary Of Regional Dialects To Shut Down

The six-volume-plus-online-updates Dictionary of American Regional English, the only project of its type based on in-person field research, was supported largely by grants from the likes of the NEH and the National Science Foundation. “The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize.” Jesse Sheidlower offers a eulogy.