As the Badger basketball team headed into the NCAA Final Four games two weeks ago, a librarian named Anna Lewis launched a crowdfunding page to give an “off-court assist” to another prized University of Wisconsin property: the Dictionary of American Regional English. “DARE is in danger. Their funding has nearly run out,” the page warned. By the following week, the campaign had raised $4,000. But that is a fraction of the $425,000 that chief editor Joan Houston Hall says she needs to continue this half-century-long project to study how Americans talk. Unless a benefactor appears, what American Dialect Society executive secretary Allan Metcalf recently called the “greatest American lexicographical project of the latter 20th century” is scheduled to wind down in June.
via Dictionary of American Regional English out of funds – Books – The Boston Globe.