Noah Webster

Noah Webster is the most famous dictionary-maker in American history, and on reason for this is the way dictionary makers ever since have taken over the name and appended it to their dictionaries. Webster's contribution to the development of English in America was considerable, and he can be seen as the beginning of a long line of specialists in language who addressed the developments in the English language in America as others would do in England and conveyed what they learned to the masses through dictionaries, grammars, and linguistics studies.

Noah Webster was born in 1758 and died in 1843. Contemporary accounts show him to have been a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easy to like. He was a provincial schoolteacher and a not-very-successful lawyer from Hartford. He was also short, pale, smug, and boastful. He believed himself to be superior to Benjamin Franklin because he was a Yale man while Franklin educated himself. In his private life he was a loner who criticized nearly everyone else, but he himself was not above stealing material from others, notably from a book called Aby-sel-pha by an Englishman named Thomas Dilworth. He credited himself with coining many words which in fact had been in the language for centuries, among them the following: demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable, and expenditure. He also tended to boast of learning he did not possess and claimed to have mastered 23 languages. Even his diss

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anners. He would write in the preface to his spelling book: To diffuse an uniformity and purity of language in America, to destroy the provincial prejudices that originate in the trifling differences of dialect and product reciprocal ridicule, to promote the interest of literature and the harmony of the United States, is the most earnest wish of the author, and it is his highest ambition to deserve the approbation and encouragement of his countrymen. Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling, but he himself expressed wildly different views on the subject. sometimes he would be in favor of radical and even far-reaching changes and would insist on such spellings as soop, bred, wimmen, groop, fether, tuf, thum, hed, and tung. At other times he would be the very soul of orthographic conservatism and would attack the useful American tendency to drop the "u" from words like colour. The book with which Webster's name is most associated, the American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, stated in the preface that it was "desirable to perpetuate the sameness" of American and British spellings and usages. Many of the spellings that he insisted were necessary in his Compendium Dictionary of the English L

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