ritain was at war with the colonies, and the schoolbooks, which traditionally had been imported from England, were in short supply. Webster in any case thought they were unsatisfactory, so he decided to fill the gap and between 1783 and 1785, when he was still in his twenties, he published three elementary books on English, a speller, a grammar, and a reader, giving it the name A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. His American Speller would be a bestseller, selling over 80 million copies in his lifetime (second only to the Bible). His intention, as he stated it, was "to introduce uniformity and accuracy of pronunciation into common schools." As early as 1782 an observer stated that the uniformity of American speech could probably be attributed to the universality of learning in North America, and the use of the American Speller may be one reason for this. At any rate, the success
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