| Summary: Although often called Websters Dictionary, or the Merriam Webster Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary is named after its original author, Noah Webster, and so the possessive form is the correct one. Webster's dictionary was the first American dictionary, and remains one of the most widely used of all dictionaries. |
Webster’s Dictionary, which is often called Websters Dictionary (the possessive apostrophe is actually more correct) or the Merriam Webster Dictionary, is perhaps one of the best known and most widely used dictionaries in the United States. It was certainly the first American dictionary.
Webster’s Dictionary was first written by Noah Webster, who was born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758. Coming of age in the revolutionary era, it is believed that at least part of Webster’s impetus for writing a dictionary was to set forth the code for an American English. A language belonging to the peoples of the United States. According to a biography on Webster at the Merriam Webster site, “He believed fervently in the developing cultural independence of the United States, a chief part of which was to be a distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation, and style.”
Noah Webster published his very first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, at the age of forty-eight.
After publishing A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, he started working on what was ultimately to become Webster’s Dictionary, a tome entitled An American Dictionary of the English Language. In the course of writing An American Dictionary of the English Language Webster himself learned twenty-six languages, including olde Anglo Saxon English and Sanskrit! He did this as part of his effort to research the origins of the words which were in the contemporary American English lexicon.
Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828, when Webster was seventy years old, and twenty-two years after he first published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. It contained 70,000 entries, and according to the Merriam Webster company, it “embodied a new standard of lexicography” and “was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson’s 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well.”
In 1841 Webster published a follow-up, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged, and in 1843 Noah Webster passed away.
Following Noah Webster’s death, brothers George and Charles Merriam, who had opened a printing and bookselling house in Springfield, Massachusetts, purchased all of the unsold copies of his 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged, and also purchased the rights to create revised editions under the imprint Merriam-Webster, which they publish to this day.
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