TOO MARVELOUS FOR WORDS

 “You’re much too much, and just too very, very

      To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary.”

As Kleenex has become generic for facial tissue, and Vaseline for petroleum jelly, so too has Webster’s become generic for dictionary. We don’t just say “look it up,” we say “check your Webster’s.” It was on April 14, 1828, that Noah’s Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language was published. One hundred and ninety years later, we do have Google for a quick look-see, and spell-check for our electronic writing, but there’s nothing like getting your hands on a hefty Webster’s for a complete definition, pronunciation, and the correct spelling of any word in question.

Born in 1758, Noah Webster graduated as a lawyer from Yale and passed the bar. Unable to find work in the law, he opened his own school. It was the teacher in him that was dissatisfied: generally with the state of education in the new Untied States, and specifically with instruction in the English language. He disapproved of having to use British textbooks in the classroom, and set out to correct the situation. At the age of 25, he published the first of three parts of his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. That first part was The American Spelling Book, later known as “the Blue Backed Speller,” which is still in print. He later published part two, a grammar, and part three, a reader consisting of American pieces written to promote democracy and responsible conduct.

Webster continued on as a journalist, essayist, and lecturer, and in an effort to protect his own rights as well those of other authors, he lobbied extensively for stringent and uniform copyright laws. In 1806, he published the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. It was the minor precursor of An American Dictionary of the English Language that he began in the following year.

The American Dictionary “Americanized” words in British usage, changing words like colour and neighbour to color and neighbor, musick to music, and theatre to theater. For the first time, it separated the i’s from the j’s, and the u’s from the v’s in the alphabet. It included new words like skunk and hickory, gleaned from the Native Americans, and also included words in languages like French and Spanish that had become common in American usage. The dictionary contained about 70,000 words, small in comparison to the over 200,000 words, current and obsolete, included in the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, but large in comparison to the common vocabulary of the day. Above all, it began the standardization of spelling. Webster argued that standardized spelling would be a big factor in uniting the separate regions of the new United States. We may speak with regional accents, but we read and write without them.

The dictionary and a later edition never sold too well: In 1828, it sold for about $15 to $20, about $400 in today’s currency. That was too high price for the average American to pay. Webster’s estate sold the rights and the unsold copies of the 1841 edition to the publishers G. & C. Merriam Company.

Billing itself as “the world’s most trusted dictionary,” trusted for spelling, definitions, and pronunciation, the dictionary became The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, currently available in editions priced from $1.98 on up. (By comparison, the OED will cost you around $1,100, but do you usually need to know that many words?) In 1982, the company name was changed to Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, and in a twist of fate, it is now owned by a British publisher, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Will we Americans go back to colour, neighbour, and theatre? Not ruddy likely.

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This is another I wrote for the community magazine. I still don't understand some of Webster's spelling choices, but he isn't around for me to interview.