Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

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 dissertations on the English language have been criticized, and linguist Thomas Pyles called his Dissertations on the English Language "a fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock."

His first important book was Dissertations on the English Language in 1789, and his great monument was An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. He turned from law to teaching in order to make a living. At the time, B...

Page 1 of 6 Next >

More on Noah Webster...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Noah Webster. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:01, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1680803.html