The fieldwork, supported by a grant from the Office of Education, was conducted during 1965–70. About eighty fieldworkers (mostly graduate students, but also some professors) were trained in phonetic transcription and fieldwork techniques; they were then sent to 1,002 carefully selected communities across the country, chosen to reflect population density and to account for settlement history and immigration patterns. Each fieldworker was required to find "informants," people willing to provide information about words, who were natives of their communities and who had lived there all, or almost all, their lives. The informants were then asked to answer the questions in the "DARE" questionnaire. In many communities more than one person contributed answers, so the total number of informants, 2,777, is much larger than the number of communities.