A short life of the author
Noah Webster did something that no single person has done before or since in the history of the English language: he changed its spelling. His An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was not merely a reference work but a declaration of cultural independence — the argument, sustained across two volumes and 70,000 entries, that American English was not a provincial corruption of British English but a legitimate national language deserving its own standard dictionary. The reforms he introduced — color for colour, honor for honour, center for centre, defense for defence, traveling for travelling — became permanent features of American orthography and mark the most successful deliberate language reform in the history of English.
The Blue-Backed Speller
Before he was a lexicographer, Webster was an educator. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, he graduated from Yale College in 1778, studied law, and taught school in several Connecticut towns. Appalled by the lack of American textbooks — schoolchildren in the new republic were still learning to read from British texts — he published A Grammatical Institute of the English Language in three parts (1783–1785): a spelling book, a grammar, and a reader.
The first part, the spelling book, was the phenomenon. Universally known as the “Blue-Backed Speller” for its distinctive blue cover, it was adopted by schools across the United States and sold continuously for over a century. Its sales are estimated at 100 million copies — making it, after the Bible, one of the bestselling books in American history. The speller standardised American pronunciation and spelling for generations and, through its reading exercises, inculcated patriotic values and a sense of American linguistic identity.
The Dictionary
In 1807, at the age of forty-nine, Webster began work on what he called “a complete Dictionary of the English language.” He spent twenty years on the project, teaching himself twenty-three languages (including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Old English) to trace the etymologies of English words. He financed the work himself, exhausting his savings and mortgaging his home.
An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828 in two volumes containing approximately 70,000 entries — 12,000 more than Samuel Johnson’s celebrated dictionary of 1755. Webster’s definitions were clear, precise, and often superior to Johnson’s. His etymologies, though based on pre-scientific comparative linguistics and often wrong by modern standards, were ambitious in scope. His illustrations of usage drew on American as well as British authors, and his definitions reflected American institutions, geography, and values.
The dictionary sold poorly at first — the two-volume set cost twenty dollars, a substantial sum. But a cheaper, abridged edition succeeded, and after Webster’s death in 1843, the rights were purchased by George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts, who began the series of revised editions that continues as Merriam-Webster to this day. The “Webster’s” brand has become so synonymous with “dictionary” in America that it has entered the language as a generic term.
Spelling Reform
Webster’s spelling reforms were driven by two convictions: that spelling should reflect pronunciation (a phonetic principle), and that America should have its own orthographic identity (a political principle). He was more radical in his early proposals than in his final dictionary — he initially advocated spellings like tung for tongue and wimmen for women — but the reforms he did implement became permanent precisely because they were moderate enough to be adopted without confusion while different enough from British usage to mark American English as distinct.
Not all of his reforms succeeded. He proposed masheen for machine, ake for ache, and soop for soup, but these were rejected by usage. The reforms that survived — the -or for -our, -er for -re, -se for -ce, single-l for double-l — succeeded because they simplified without distorting and because they reflected genuine American pronunciation.
Legacy
Webster’s broader ambition — to create a unified American culture through a standardised language — has been both celebrated and criticised. He was an ardent Federalist who believed that linguistic uniformity was essential to national unity. His textbooks and dictionary were instruments of nation-building as much as works of scholarship. Historians of American English regard him as the single most important figure in the creation of a distinct American standard.
Collecting Webster
An American Dictionary of the English Language (S. Converse, New York, 1828, 2 volumes, quarto) in first edition is one of the most important American books and a major collecting target. The Grammatical Institute Part I — the Blue-Backed Speller — in any of its early editions (1783 onwards) is extremely scarce because the books were used to destruction by schoolchildren. A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), Webster’s earlier, smaller dictionary, is also collected as the precursor to the great dictionary.