Noah Webster Dictionary

3 Key excerpts on "Noah Webster Dictionary"

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  Recycling the Past

  Popular Uses of American History

  • Leila Zenderland(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  11 The development of Webster's interest in language coincided with an emerging emphasis on order. Throughout his life he exhibited a dualistic at-titude toward language. It was a subject worthy of study by all Americans for its own sake, but also a means to a greater end. In 1789 he published the first significant American essay on linguistics, Dissertation? on the English Language. . . , 1 2 His concept of language as a tool of social change had emerged. Webster believed that cultural as well as political independence was necessary for the new nation to survive. Like Schlegel, Grimm, Home Tooke, and other Europeans, Webster believed that a connection between Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood, see Richard M. Rollins, Noah Webster: Propagandist for the Revolution, Connecticut History, forthcoming, or Richard M. Rollins, The Long Journey of Noah Webster (Diss., Michigan State University, 1976). The best source of in-formation on Webster's early life is an unpublished autobiographical fragment: [Noa^ Webster], Memoir of Noah Webster, Webster Family Papers, Box 1, Yale Univ. Archives. For a complete listing of all his work, see Edwin A. Carpenter, ed., A Bibliography of the Writ-ings of Noah Webster (New York: New York Public Library, 1958). 11 [Noah Webster], An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution . . . (Philadelphia: Pritchard and Hill, 1787). See also Webster's Diary, The Papers of Noah Webster, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library (archive hereafter cited as NYPL). I2 Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language . . . (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Company, 1789). Words as Social Contro l 53 language and the nation existed. A national language is a bond of national union, he said, and it should be employed to render the people of this country national. . . , 13 Yet Webster's anxiety increased in response to the events of the 1790s.

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  Words and Their Meaning

  • Howard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Here a debate developed between those who wished to derive standards of usage from the linguistic practice of the mother-country and those who wished for the English language in America to develop in its own way and derive its own standards and authorities. Chief protagonist of the second view in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was Noah Webster, who not only attempted to introduce a wide ranging spelling reform but also set about compiling a dictionary which would do for American English what Johnson's had done for the English of Britain. If Johnson had taken the best British writers as his authorities, Webster would take the best American writers

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  Dictionaries

  British and American

  • James Root Hulbert(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The vogue of Walker’s dictionary was as great as that of Johnson’s. In course of time appeared publications which inserted Walker’s pronunciations into Johnson’s text. Joseph Worcester prepared an edition of this sort: an abridgement of Todd’s Johnson with Walker’s pronunciations inserted in the entries. The number of editions of these dictionaries - Johnson’s alone, Walker’s alone (a revised edition of it appeared as late as 1904), and the two in combination - testifies to the great public interest in ‘correct English’, which had in the minds of many the importance of being evidence of good breeding and good social standing. It is amusing to note that in 1764 John Wesley published a dictionary whose title page emphasises ‘hard words which are found in the best English writers’, and has this: ‘N.B. The author assures you, he thinks this is the best English dictionary in the world.’

  Noah Webster

  The next notable step in the development of English dictionaries was made in the United States by a man almost as remarkable as Johnson, though his productions, aside from his speller and his dictionary, were ephemeral. Born in 1758, Noah Webster had had a full life before he turned to the making of dictionaries. An early, brief experience as school teacher convinced him of the need for improvement in the text-books for English. So he published a grammar, reader and speller. The last had such wide acceptance that, as has been stated often, the income from it was sufficient to support him and his family for the rest of his life. In addition he engaged in politics, published arguments in favour of adoption of the Constitution of the United States, and wrote many books. In 1806 he made a trial flight in lexicography with the publication of a small dictionary. Immediately thereafter he started work on his large dictionary, which appeared in two volumes in 1828 under the title, An American Dictionary of the English Language . He lived to complete a revision of this, which he had to finance and publish himself, and which came from the press in 1839-41, when he was already in his eighties.

  Webster was a man of original, even iconoclastic ideas, which he advanced in the uncompromising manner characteristic of some men who are sure that their ideas are right. In particular he had the temerity to criticise Johnson’s dictionary vehemently in print. Even in the revisions that had been made of Johnson since his own day, Webster saw much that did not agree with American usage - like the later Mr Mencken, Webster was a stalwart American - and the definitions seemed to him cumbersome and sometimes, for ordinary readers at any rate, unintelligible. Perhaps if Webster had been less pugnacious in manner, his animadversions against Johnson might not have aroused the disfavour they did. Today at least it is to be hoped that informed people would realise that any book, any work of human hand and brain, is imperfect. That is the reason revisions of books, notably dictionaries, and new biographies of famous people, new surveys of history, etc., are published. To be sure, even now statements are made frequently in print to the effect that so and so has produced the ‘definitive’ treatment of this subject or that, as if no further discoveries about it, no new ideas concerning it, would ever come into being. Fortunately thought and knowledge never stand still. Of course Johnson’s dictionary has faults, and so has every other dictionary of English or of any other subject that has been published. The violence of Webster’s strictures on Johnson, however, was due only in part to lack of tact; he saw that Johnson’s enormous prestige was checking progress and making it impossible for him to get the support he needed in order to bring out a vastly better book.

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