For centuries now, English has been the language of villages and nations throughout the world, and it varies, we say, according to something we call ‘region’, though we could hardly come up with a vaguer term. The most familiar dictionaries of English describe a standard variety, though different regions may develop different standards over time – Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language accounts for Standard American English, while The Macquarie Dictionary does the same for Standard Australian English, and so on (for both, see Chapter 23). Some dictionaries of regional English represent a nation’s distinctive lexical features, while others represent local features, with dictionaries of every imaginable scope in between those extremes. ‘No nation is of a piece’, writes F. G. Cassidy – editor of both the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Dictionary of Jamaican English – ‘It is no accident therefore that language, which reflects conditions in the society, is nowhere all of a piece either.’ Regional dictionaries assemble non-standard pieces of English into complex pictures of regional language, history, and culture.