Noah Webster

Noah Webster (born October 16, 1758, West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died May 28, 1843, New Haven, Connecticut) was an American lexicographer known for his American Spelling Book (1783) and his American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1828; 2nd ed., 1840). Webster was instrumental in giving American English a dignity and vitality of its own. Both his speller and dictionary reflected his principle that spelling, grammar, and usage should be based upon the living, spoken language rather than on artificial rules. He also made useful contributions as a teacher, grammarian, journalist, essayist, lecturer, and lobbyist.

Webster entered Yale in 1774, interrupted his studies to serve briefly in the American Revolution, and was graduated in 1778. He taught school, did clerical work, and studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1781.

While teaching in Goshen, New York, in 1782, Webster became dissatisfied with texts for children that ignored the American culture, and he began his lifelong efforts to promote a distinctively American education. His first step in this direction was preparation of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first part being The American Spelling Book (1783), the famed “Blue-Backed Speller,” which has never been out of print. The spelling book provided much of Webster’s income for the rest of his life, and its total sales have been estimated as high as 100,000,000 copies or more.

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A grammar (1784) and a reader (1785) completed the Institute. The grammar was based on Webster’s principle (enunciated later in his dictionary) that “grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar.” Although he did not always follow this principle and often relied on analogy, reason, and true or fanciful etymology, his inconsistencies were no greater than those of his English contemporaries. He spoke of American English as “Federal English,” always contrasting the superior usage of the yeoman of America with the alleged affectations of London. The reader consisted mainly of American selections chosen to promote democratic ideals and responsible moral and political conduct.

The absence of a federal copyright law until 1790 and discrepancies among the state laws left the author of a popular book open to piracy unless he exerted strenuous efforts. Webster’s letters to various state legislatures reflect his activity on his own behalf, and he traveled widely, lobbying for uniform copyright laws and teaching, lecturing, and giving singing lessons to help support himself. In 1787 he founded the short-lived American Magazine in New York City. This publication combined literary criticism with essays on education, government, agriculture, and a variety of other subjects. After his marriage in 1789, Webster practiced law in Hartford until 1793, when he founded in New York a pro-Federalist daily newspaper, The American Minerva, and a semi-weekly paper, The Herald, which was made up of reprinted selections from the daily. He sold both papers in 1803.

Webster wrote on many subjects: politics (“Sketches of American Policy,” 1785, sometimes called the first statement of the U.S. Constitution), economics, medicine, physical science, and language. He noted the living language as he traveled but with varying degrees of approbation, according to the degree of correspondence between what he heard and what he himself used. His early enthusiasm for spelling reform abated in his later works, but he is largely responsible for the differences that exist today between British and U.S. spelling. Although he was himself assailed for including slang and jargon in his dictionary, Webster was extremely touchy about the common taboo words. He commented often on the vulgarity of some of the words and citations in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), and in later life he published an expurgated version of the Bible in which euphemism replaced the franker statements of the Authorized Version.

Webster moved in 1798 to New Haven, where he was elected to the Common Council and remained active in local politics for the rest of his life. He was a founder of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and a participant in founding Amherst Academy and Amherst College.

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In 1806 Webster published his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Though it was no more than a preparation for his later dictionary, it contained not only about 5,000 more words than Johnson’s dictionary but also a number of innovations, including perhaps the first separation of i and j, and of u and v, as alphabetical entities. He started work on the American Dictionary in 1807, acquiring at least a nodding acquaintance with about 20 languages and traveling in France and England in 1824–25 in search of materials unavailable to him in the United States. His attempts to find plausible etymologies, however, were not supported by investigation of the actual state of linguistic knowledge.

The first edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in two volumes in 1828, when Webster was 70 years old. It comprised 2,500 copies in the U.S. and 3,000 in England, and it sold out in little more than a year, despite harsh attacks on its “Americanisms,” its unconventional preferences in spelling, its tendency to advocate U.S. rather than British usage and spelling, and its inclusion of nonliterary words, particularly technical terms from the arts and sciences. The dictionary contained about 70,000 entries and between 30,000 and 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Despite his frequent disparagement of Johnson, his indebtedness to Johnson’s literary vocabulary is apparent in both definitions and citations. The American Dictionary was relatively unprofitable, and the 1841 revision was not successful. The rights were purchased from Webster’s estate by George and Charles Merriam (see Merriam-Webster dictionary).

Webster died in 1843 and was buried in a cemetery adjacent to the Yale campus. A controversialist in his youth—quick to defend his literary efforts and to demolish his critics—and a conservative in religion and in politics in his later years, he was the last lexicographer of the English language to be remembered for his personality and as a public figure as well as for his work.