Happy Dictionary Day, word-nerds! This is the official holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Noah Webster, who would be 254 years old if he were still living and breathing on this planet. This article is from the archive of our partner Happy Dictionary Day, word-nerds! This is the official holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Noah Webster, who would be 254 years old if he were still living and breathing on this planet. Webster, of course, is the guy we consider the father of the American Dictionary, without whom our word knowledge would be something quite different—hence, it's not just his birthday, it's a day to celebrate dictionaries in general. Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor at large, passed along two quotes by Webster he considers "appropriate and inspirational in that they continue to be true for us today." First, "the business of the lexicographer is to collect, arrange, and define, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language, and leave the author to select from them at his pleasure and according to his judgment." Second, "Analogy, custom, and habit form a better rule to guide men in the use of words than any tribunal of men.” Webster's was not the first dictionary (those date back to Sumerian times) but was the first Americanized version, coming after the "first purely English dictionary," Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabetical (1604), which included 3,000 or so words. In 1746 to 47, per M-W.com, "Samuel Johnson undertook the most ambitious English dictionary to that time, a list of 43,500 words." Webster's early 19th-century dictionary featuring 70,000 words sprang from that, and was followed by the Oxford English Dictionary. Dictionaries would never be the same. A few facts about Noah Webster with which to impress your friends, if your friends are the type to be impressed by such things:
In further celebration, here is a dictionary of terrible words. This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
Webster was undeterred. Over the next quarter century, he produced a work that included over 70,000 words with their origins. To escape what he called the "dissipations and expenditures" of New Haven, in 1812 he moved his family to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he remained for the next decade. There in the quiet college town, he worked on the mammoth, two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language. By the time it was completed in 1828, the dictionary was greeted with respect, even reverence. But it was not a commercial success. The price tag was astronomical for those times — $15 to $20 — and the book sold poorly. When Webster died in 1843, he left behind a large stock of unsold volumes. Springfield printers Charles and George Merriam saw an opportunity. The brothers acquired the rights to Webster's dictionary. They planned to produce a low-cost edition, which they believed would sell well in a nation that placed increasing value on literacy. They were right. The Merriam brothers became rich men. The publishing tradition they began has continued uninterrupted through 13 editions of the dictionary.
Words Matter Webster's Second may have been the largest mass-produced book in American history
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758, Noah Webster came of age during the American Revolution and was a strong advocate of the Constitutional Convention. He believed fervently in the developing cultural independence of the United States, a chief part of which was to be a distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation, and style.
In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. For more information on this milestone in American reference publishing, please see Noah Webster's Spelling Reform and A Sample Glossary from A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Immediately thereafter he went to work on his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, for which he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, in order to research the origins of his own country's tongue. This book, published in 1828, embodied a new standard of lexicography; it was a dictionary with 70,000 entries that was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well. One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen—the latter of which he argued was "the old and true spelling" and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.) While Webster was promoting his dictionary, George and Charles Merriam opened a printing and bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1831. G. & C. Merriam Co. (renamed Merriam-Webster Inc. in 1982) inherited the Webster legacy when the Merriam brothers bought the unsold copies of the 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged from Webster's heirs after the great man's death in 1843. At the same time they secured the rights to create revised editions of that work. It was the beginning of a publishing tradition that has continued uninterrupted to this day at Merriam-Webster. Further information on the birthplace and life of Noah Webster is available at the Noah Webster House/Museum of West Hartford History. |