DARE in photos

Fred Cassidy

DARE founder Fred Cassidy in 1949 as he was developing the Wisconsin English Language Survey, which was a pilot project for DARE. (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)

Fred Cassidy with fieldworkers

Fred Cassidy and fieldworkers Reino Maki and Ben Crane standing in front of one of DARE's "Word Wagons." (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)

Ruth Porter was one of DARE's early fieldworkers, asking, "Is it a frying pan? Skillet? Spider?" (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)

Graduate students and DARE

Jennifer Ellsworth, a DARE project assistant, was one of the hundreds of UW-Madison graduate students who worked on the dictionary over the last 50 years. (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)

DARE's trove of audio

Beth Witherell and Jennifer Ellsworth, graduate students who worked on DARE, listen to one of the more than 1,800 audio recordings made in the field. Their job was to transcribe pronunciations in phonetics and select parts of conversations for examples of words to include in DARE. (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)

Fred Cassidy as a fieldworker, making an audio recording of "Arthur the Rat," a short story used to receive phonetic representation of the various sounds of American English (Courtesy: UW-Madison Archives)