Happy Dictionary Day!
Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758. He wrote the first American dictionary and included many Americanized words like “color” instead of “colour” and “center” instead of “centre.” He believed in simplifying the language, as did many founding fathers.
While Webster wrote the first American dictionary, the idea of word lists with definitions go back millenniums. The oldest wordlist is a cuneiform tablet with bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian words from 2300 BCE. The oldest monolingual dictionary was found in China and dates to around 300 BCE.
I’d be willing to bet that as soon as humans could write, they were making word lists. How else were scribes to learn the correct order of their symbols?
I find it interesting that there were dictionaries around all this time (the first dictionary in English dates back to 1220 AD.) and yet people were very fluid in their spelling. If you ever read historical journals, such as ones from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the spelling changes from page to page.
Who decided that uniformity was important? If I were to guess, it was when schools changed from an apprentice-style to a classroom setting. It’s hard to grade children if they there are no spelling rules. As someone who gets annoyed by all the spelling errors in Facebook memes, I’m not sure much as changed. But I am grateful to Noah Webster for trying.
Noah Webster Notables
- (The following facts are from The Noah Webster House.)
- Noah socialized with Ben Franklin.
- Noah loved music and dancing.
- He once lived in a house in New Haven that belonged to Benedict Arnold.
- The dictionary took Noah 27 years to compile and was published when he was 70 years old.
- Noah’s, An American Dictionary, published in 1828, contained 70,000 words.
- Noah helped form the Society for the Promotion of Freedom in 1792, which was an early abolitionist group.
- Noah was very outspoken and frequently pointed out the flaws of others.
- Noah remained committed to education throughout his life. He believed that the survival of the United States depended on its educated people.
- Noah died in 1843 at the age of 85. He is buried in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery.