The online Dictionary of American Regional English lets readers search entries in full, so a search for donut and doughnut turns up many regional terms. Among them are friedcake, twister, floater, sinker, finger, drop cake, dough ball, dough boy, fried hole, and chokerhole. DARE entries preserve where a term was collected, who supplied it, the survey question behind it, and evidence from field recordings, letters, journals, newspapers, books, and diaries. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Regional Doughnut Names Include “Friedcake,” “Finger,” “Drop Cake,” and “Chokerhole””
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
The Dictionary of American Regional English, also called D.A.R.E., is a work we turn to a lot on the show because it has answers you can’t find anywhere else.
But there’s something happening online that wasn’t happening in the print volume.
The print volume was great. They’re very good. Got a lot out of them.
But now you can search everything. I mean everything.
You can do a full-text search.
For example, I typed in the word donut.
And now I have in front of me all of the search results for every entry that contains the word donut.
And many of these are words for a kind of donut that belong to particular parts of the country.
Ooh, let’s hear some.
So a fried cake.
Do you know fried cake?
A twister, a floater.
Some places a submarine isn’t just a sandwich. It’s also a donut.
No kidding.
Yeah.
Sinker, finger, drop cake, dough ball, dough boy, jelly roll.
Everyone knows a joke.
Yeah.
But choker hole.
What about a fried hole?
A fried hole is a donut hole, right?
Never heard of that.
Yeah, so there are all of these different terms, and each of these have information associated with them, little flags, little data, like where they were collected, who said them, what survey question generated the response.
Because the data that’s here isn’t just drummed up out of nothing.
Field workers were sent out with tape recorders to collect authentic voices, and now some of those authentic voices can be heard online.
The field workers also spent some time digging into other dictionaries, going to primary research, letters and journals and papers, and even going to newspapers and books that have been published, diaries, and drawing out these examples, making entries and putting them in print.
So we have here a document that validates that American English is not growing the same.
It’s very different still.
Yeah, and it’s a living document.
It’s a dynamic document.
The folks at DARE, the editors at DARE, announced recently that they would begin new fieldwork.
They’re going to go out there and start collecting new data for, I guess, the second edition of the dictionary.
Yeah, to compare that with what they collected before.
That’s going to be so exciting.
So we hope that you’re excited about this as we are.
This is a tool that we think you need to use in order to understand how Americans really speak.
You can find more at daredictionary.com.
It is expensive.
It’s $150 a year per person.
But you’ll probably find that your local library, be it at a university or downtown, will probably start carrying this alongside the other digital reference works.
And another way to get answers to your language questions is to call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.
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