will omit the books relating to husbandry, but on the other hand will include more notions relating to the life of the artisan and the syntactical aspects of his speech." One of the main fieldworkers, Stanley Ellis, later wrote, "The problems of the investigation of town dialects ... are so complex as to be insoluble, in the opinion of this reviewer".

The original book Survey of English Dialects: Introduction (1962) listed only 311 sites, excluding Newport and the village of Lyonshall