Noah Webster
Categories: 1758 births | 1843 deaths | American lexicographers | People from Connecticut
Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook author, Bible translator, spelling reformer, writer, and editor. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education." His "Blue-backed Speller" books taught five generations of children in the United States how to spell and read, and his name became synonymous with "dictionary", especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary which was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.
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Biography
Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford, Connecticut to an agriculural colonial family. His father was a farmer and a weaver, and his mother a homemaker. Noah's siblings were his brothers, Charles and Abraham, and his sisters, Mercy and Jerusha.
At the age of 16, he began attending Yale, the sole college in Connecticut. His years at Yale overlapped with the American Revolutionary War, and because of food shortages, many of his college classes were held in Glastonbury, Connecticut.
He graduated from Yale in 1778. Unable to afford law school, he taught school in Glastonbury, Hartford, and West Hartford. He eventually earned his law degree in 1781 and was admitted to the Hartford bar the same year.
As a teacher, he had come to dislike American elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses, poorly staffed with untrained teachers, and poorly equipped with no desks and unsatisfactory textbooks which came from England. Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785).
The speller was originally entitled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book. Most people called it the "Blue-backed Speller" because of its blue cover, and for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time; by 1861, it was selling a million copies per year, and its royalty of less than one cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. Even Ben Franklin used Webster's book to teach his granddaughter how to read. Some consider it to be the first dictionary created in the United States, and it helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees.
Unauthorized printing of his books, and disparate copyright laws that varied among the thirteen states, led Webster to champion the federal copyright law that was successfully passed in 1790.
Webster married Rebecca Greenleaf in 1789. They had eight children.
In 1793, the Websters moved to New York City to be closer to George Washington and the new country's federal administration. On December 9, 1793, Noah Webster founded New York's first daily newspaper, American Minerva (later known as The Commercial Advertiser). He also published the semi-weekly publication, The Herald, A Gazette for the country (later known as The New York Spectator).
The Websters moved back to New Haven in 1798.
In 1806 Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.
The following year, at the age of 43, Webster began writing an expanded and comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which would take twenty-seven years to complete. To supplement the documentation of the etymology of the words, Webster would learn twenty-six languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced, and used words differently.
During the course of his work on the book, the family moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1812, where Webster helped to found Amherst College. Later in 1822, the family moved back to New Haven, and Webster earned an Ll.D. from Yale the following year.
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained 70,000 words, of which 12,000 had never appeared in any earlier published dictionary. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American spellings like "color" instead of the English "colour", "music" instead " of "musick", "wagon" instead of "waggon", "center" instead of "centre", and "honor" instead of "honour". He also added American words that were not in English dictionaries like "skunk" and "squash". At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828.
In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. On May 28, 1843, a few days after he had completed revising an appendix to the second edition, Noah Webster died.
Sources
- http://noahwebsterhouse.org/biography.html The Noah Webster House, Museum of West Hartford History.
- http://www.m-w.com/info/noah.htm Merriam-Webster website
- http://www.ctheritage.org/encyclopedia/ct1763_1818/webster.htm Connecticut Heritage website
- http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/WAT_WIL/WEBSTER_NOAH_1758_1843_.html Biographical entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
- http://www.bartleby.com/65/we/WebsterN.html Biographical entry in the Columbia Encyclopedia
Quotes
When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, "just men who will rule in the fear of God." The preservation of [our] government depends on the faithful discharge of this Duty; if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine Commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the Laws.
- -History of the United States by Noah Webster.
Webster's dictionary
It is reported that Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary contains the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any reference volume. Webster considered "education useless without the Bible". Noah Webster believed that the Bible and Christianity played important roles in the lives of a free people and its government. "In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed.... No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people...."
Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language was produced during the years when the American home, church and school were established upon a Biblical and patriotic basis. Webster, descended on his mother's side from Pilgrim Governor, William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation, made important contributions to an American educational system which kept the nation on a Christian Constitutional course for many years. The famous "blue-backed Speller," his "Grammars," and "Reader," all contained Biblical and patriotic themes and Webster spearheaded the flood of educational volumes emphasizing Christian Constitutional values for more than a century.
Webster published his first dictionary of the English language in 1806, and in 1828 he published the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language (copyrighted on April 14th that year), whose title reveals his ambitions. Webster changed the spelling of many words in his dictionaries in an attempt to make them more phonemic. Many of the differences between American English and other English variants evident today originated this way.
Webster's dictionary was so popular that "Webster's" became synonymous with dictionary to many Americans. As a result, the Webster's name lost trademark protection and is now used by numerous publishers in the titles of their dictionaries. Among these, the Merriam-Webster's dictionary is considered to be the most direct descendant of Noah Webster's lexicographical tradition, the Merriam brothers having purchased the rights to revise the dictionary from Webster's heirs upon his death in 1843. The 1913 version of the Webster's Dictionary also gained some prominence in modern times.
Noah Webster claimed to have coined only one word - demoralize, which he defined: "To corrupt or undermine the morals of; to destroy or lessen the effect of moral principles on; to render corrupt in morals."
Webster's Bible
Besides his dictionary, Webster also released his own translation of the Bible in 1833. In doing the translation, Webster used the King James Version as a base. He consulted the Hebrew and Greek along with various other versions and commentaries. Webster molded the KJV to correct grammar, replaced words that were no longer used, and did away with words and phrases that could be seen as offensive.
Webster's works today
All editions of Webster's Dictionary published in 1913 and earlier, along with the Webster Bible, and Dissertation on the English Language are available in the public domain.