This Day in Literary History (Noah Webster’s "American Dictionary")

April 21, 1828—After more than a quarter century of obsessive labor, Noah Webster –soldier, schoolteacher, spelling reformer, textbook author, newspaper and magazine editor, county judge, and copyright advocate – published Original American Dictionary of the English Language. Like fellow Federalist John Marshall, “America’s Schoolmaster” produced a grand nationalist body of work that unified his country.

After the Revolutionary War (in which not only served but played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at the head of fellow Yale students for the benefit of lifelong hero George Washington), Webster turned to teaching and was disheartened by the state of American education, particularly by schoolchildren’s use of English rather than American materials. In response he created A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783), a combined speller-grammar-reader. Benjamin Franklin was just one of many Americans to use the so-called "Blue-backed Speller" to teach his granddaughter how to read, spell, and pronounce words.

Like the somewhat younger James Fenimore Cooper, Webster possessed somewhat cranky political views that at times put him at odds with his countrymen, but he also took a British literary model and gave Americans a completely distinctive form of literature. Cooper (who, in later years, was frequently in court over libel suits against Whig defamation) started out as an unsuccessful imitator of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott before his Leatherstocking Saga carved out a niche as the first Western series. Webster, a Federalist who often felt out of place in the Age of Jackson, took the British form of the dictionary and gave it a very American turn.

For a simple, uncorrupt people, Webster’s 70,000-word 1828 dictionary stripped language to its essentials: “Music” instead of “Musick,” for instance. More important, it included 12,000 words and from 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. He completed a revision of his bestseller only a few days before his death at 1843.

I did not realize until researching this post that Webster also produced a translation of the Bible five years after his epic dictionary. Some scholars feel as if it were a missed opportunity, since, although he knew Latin and Greek, he mostly confined himself to correcting grammar in the King James version and eliminating any passages "so offensive, especially to females, as to create a reluctance in young persons to attend Bible classes and schools, in which they are required to read passages which cannot be repeated without a blush.”

At a time when several translators were engaged in a Thomas Jefferson-like effort to expunge portions that did not conform to their less orthodox theologies, Webster had no interest in offering anything that would overturn traditional notions of Christianity. That, combined with his rather light editing of the King James version, meant that his version would not displace the two-centuries-old one.

But today, Webster’s translation is enjoying somewhat of a vogue. Because it is now in the public domain, it is available in the public domain and can thus be downloaded for free.