3

Webster’s First Dictionary

The Minerva had all but extinguished Webster’s hopes of a literary career—but not quite, as he explained to the prominent journalist and man of letters Joseph Dennie in 1796: “I once intended to have devoted my life to literary pursuits. The cold hand of poverty chilled my hopes, but has not wholly blasted them. . . . My plan of education is but barely begun. When I shall complete it is uncertain.” By “education” he meant mostly the linguistic education of Americans and promotion of a distinctly American language.¹

He needed to get out of New York. With income still trickling in from his spelling book, he decided to move his family to New Haven, where he imagined he could return to his “literary” life, meaning books of one kind or another on language. Dragging his considerable debts behind him, he and his family made the move in 1798. His “literary” plan was something of a fantasy, but he was desperate.

In his writing about language, he had demonstrated credentials to take on the task of writing an American dictionary. New Haven would be a good place to attempt it. Rev. Elizur Goodrich, soon to become a professor of law at Yale, was the first, back in 1787, to propose that Webster should write a dictionary. It was initially a vague and, to Webster, seemingly impossible idea that the young schoolteacher was ill-prepared to pursue, as he stated in 1828: Goodrich had “suggested to me, the propriety and expediency of my compiling a dictionary, which should complete a system for the instruction of the citizens of this country in the language. At that time, I could not indulge the thought, much less the hope, of undertaking such a work; as I was neither qualified by research, nor had I the means of support, during the execution of the work, had I been disposed to undertake it.” For years afterward people kept telling him he should consider writing a dictionary. “Sir, we must . . . have a Dictionary, and to YOU we must look for this necessary work,” wrote an admirer in 1790. “I hope this work is already begun—I wish it were finished.”²

He felt hounded, exhausted, and relieved. It was like coming home. Settling in for what turned out to be almost fifteen years, he rented the forfeited two-story Georgian house built by Benedict Arnold, which he purchased not long after. It enjoyed a commanding view of Long Island Sound, with a well-planted garden where he could indulge his emerging enthusiasm for horticulture, and generally promised all the virtues of a retreat for a man still determined to reform America but now more retiringly, from the sanctuary of his study. To signal his determination and new sense of purpose, he ensured his study would remain shielded from the “madding crowd” by lining its walls with sand to keep out entirely the sounds of his growing and boisterous family.³

Before getting down to work on a dictionary, there were still a few sentiments he felt compelled to get off his chest. In an aggressive circular “Letter” to American colleges and other “seminaries of learning” he sought to “awaken” his readers to the egregious errors and “extreme ignorance” of “foreign” grammarians. “I have long since laid aside the study of language, and been a silent spectator,” he writes, but he cannot remain silent any longer. He asserts that his main theme will be that “language is not only formed but must arrive to a tolerable state of perfection before a grammar of that language can be constructed. Languages are not formed by philosophers but by ignorant barbarians. . . . Men speak before they write. . . . Grammars are made to show the student what a language is, not how it ought to be.” He dresses his argument in extravagant nationalistic language. Mentioning the sins of Johnson and Lowth, who “had no idea of the true principles on which the language is built,” he sets the stage for the brand of patriotic lexicography on which he was about to embark: “Where shall we rest if we are to be led from change to change by the caprice of any foreign stage player who chooses to be singular or any compiler of a dictionary or grammar who sets his own opinions in opposition to the established practice of a nation?”⁴

One could conclude from these general remarks that Webster was advertising himself as an opponent of linguistic prescriptivism of any kind, grammars (especially British) and dictionaries included, and that when he got into dictionary-making he was going to preach that dictionaries must simply confine themselves to recording the way people use the language. This issue, however, is complex and has never been clear-cut in lexicography, either before or after Webster, and we shall see that, if anything, Webster turned out to be quite prescriptive—more so, certainly, than Johnson. One reason was that Webster believed grammar and lexicography should be moral agents, shielding the public by omitting language that was morally repugnant and offensive and providing definitions that were morally instructive. He could not abide what he called the rude or vulgar words that Johnson had included in his dictionary, such as sucked, fornication, and whore, and he would therefore studiously avoid drawing on “old” plays, especially by Shakespeare, to illustrate the meaning of words. He profoundly mistrusted the English stage. In October 1807, he would tell David Ramsay, a physician from Charleston, South Carolina, one of the first major historians of the American Revolution and the first biographer of George Washington, that from plays such rude words “pass into other books—yes, into standard authorities; and national language as well as morals are corrupted and debased by the influence of the stage!” In a later chapter, I shall return to this issue of prescriptivism, what the scholar Jack Lynch has called the “lexicographer’s dilemma.”⁵

Webster’s mission in 1798 was to settle down to work on a dictionary that would adjust the balance in favor of American English in the United States, even if anglophiles in New York and Boston, annoyed by his animadversions on England’s language and culture, were ganging up on him: “The English are determined to ruin my influence, if possible, for no reason unless that I do not love England better than my own country: for I aver I never have treated their nation with disrespect. But I will not long submit to be thus abused by the subjects of foreign nations.” These are fighting words. He seemed to be warming up for the main event: a dictionary that would wage his private war against British language usage and settle the question of American linguistic sovereignty with the voice of authority that a dictionary would give him. He now believed he was eminently qualified to write the kind of dictionaries he was convinced the country needed. On June 4, 1800, he announced in the New Haven newspapers that he was proceeding with his plans to write not one but three dictionaries: one for schools, one for the countinghouse (a place where commercial business is transacted), and one for “men of science”—not what we think of as a “scientific dictionary” but one for the learned generally. His dictionary, above all, would be an American dictionary, “long since projected”: “The differences in the language of the two countries will continue to multiply, and render it necessary that we should have Dictionaries of the American Language.”⁶

His public notice that he was about to write a dictionary, especially an American or “Columbian” one, once again stirred up a hornet’s nest against him. Warren Dutton was chief editor of the New England Palladium and an arch conservative in matters of language. In two harsh articles in 1801, he argued that Webster’s declared intention to write a dictionary that would use as his model New England spoken English would corrupt the language. He explained the danger of enthroning such provincialisms in a dictionary:

A language, arrived at its zenith, like ours, and copious and expressive in the extreme, requires no introduction of new words. . . . Colloquial barbarisms abound in all countries, but among no civilized peoples are they admitted with impunity into books. . . . Now, in what can a Columbian dictionary differ from an English one, but in these barbarisms? Who are the Columbian authors who do not write in the English language and spell in the English manner, except Noah Webster, Junior, Esq.? The embryo dictionary then must either be a dictionary of pure English words, and in that case superfluous, as we already possess the admirable lexicon of Johnson, or else must contain vulgar, provincial words, unauthorized by good writers, and in this case, must surely be the just object of ridicule and censure. . . . If the Connecticut lexicographer considers the retaining of the English language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt at once the language of the aborigines. . . . If he will persist, in spite of common sense, to furnish us with a dictionary, which we do not want, . . . I will furnish him with a title for it. Let, then, the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name, and be called “NOAH’S ARK.”

“I do not like my name, Noah,” Webster once ruefully admitted; now he had reason to like it even less.⁷

He replied curtly in a letter, “To the New England Palladium,” on November 10, 1801, “It would be as difficult for me to corrupt and debase the language as it is for him [Dutton] to improve it.” Reminding the public of Webster’s “absurd orthographical doctrines,” Dutton had the last word: “Sometimes vanity appears among us in the shape of a new spelling-book, which, ornamented with a wooden engraving of its author, fondly hopes, together with its own merits, to transmit his features to posterity. Sometimes it appears in proposals for publishing a Columbian dictionary, in which the vulgar provincialisms of uneducated Americans are to be quoted as authorities for language.”⁸

Other scurrilous attacks had appeared just a few days after Webster’s announcement. One appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora newspaper. It called him a ridiculous “oddity of literature,” set on making money “by a scheme which ought to be and will be discountenanced by every man who admires the classic English writers, who has sense enough to see the confusion which must arise from such a silly project—and the incapacity of a man who thus undertakes a work which, if it were at all necessary or eligible, would require the labor of a number of learned and competent men to accomplish it.” Another attack was an offering by Joseph Dennie, the exasperated, sardonic, and highly influential editor of the Philadelphia Port Folio, a magazine constantly on the hunt for American excesses and eager to expose them. He hoped Webster’s dictionary, if it ever appeared, would “meet the contempt it deserves from all the friends of literature.” Dennie compared Webster to “a maniac gardener, who, instead of endeavoring to clear his garden of weeds, in opposing to reason, entwines them with his flowers!”⁹

2

The United States was not languishing in a lexicographical desert when Webster decided to become a lexicographer. There was always Johnson’s dictionary in addition to the numerous pronouncing and spelling dictionary imports from England. School dictionaries, particularly, had long been recognized as vital for American schools into which there was a steady flow of immigrants and others with little or no ability with the language. As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his pamphlet Idea of an English School, “Each Boy should have an English Dictionary to help him over Difficulties”—he never specified which one, although it would have had to be British. There was nothing else to choose from. In 1771, a teacher in an English grammar school in New York made it clear that everybody in his class “will have Johnson’s Dictionary”—he does not say which edition. Added to English imports, dictionaries printed or written in America were also available: an edition of William Perry’s Royal Standard Dictionary issued by Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1788; Thomas Sheridan’s General Dictionary of the English Language published in Philadelphia in 1780; the clergyman Caleb Alexander’s The Columbian Dictionary of the English Language in 1800; and a couple for schools produced by residents of Connecticut.¹⁰

One of the latter, A School Dictionary, Being a Compendium of the Latest and Most Improved Dictionaries (1797–98), was compiled by Dr. Johnson’s namesake, Samuel Johnson Jr. (no relation), born a year before Webster, who was teaching just a few miles down the road in Guildford, Connecticut, and living in New Haven. He published his dictionary in 1798, the very year Webster moved to New Haven. Containing 4,300 words in two hundred pages, small enough for a schoolboy to fit into his pocket, it was the first dictionary of English compiled by an American, copies of which today are difficult to find, although there is one in the British Library and one at Yale. Unlike Webster, Johnson Jr. had no idea of revising or reforming Johnson but instead in his abridgment attempted to Americanize the Scot William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary (published in London in 1775 and in America ten years later). Johnson Jr.’s lexicographical effort, surprisingly, sold out in a few months, prompting him to pick up with a neighbor in East Guildford, a pastor named John Elliott, producing a revised version, A Selected, Pronouncing and Accented Dictionary, printed in Suffield, Connecticut in 1800. Containing five thousand more words than Johnson Jr.’s earlier edition, it included more Americanisms and deliberately set out to “purify” the language by excluding “vulgar” words, which appealed to Webster. Apparently learning of Webster’s nearby presence in New Haven, Elliott sent him a copy of the manuscript (containing an introduction praising “the ingenious Mr. Webster”) for his thoughts. He then inserted Webster’s positive response as part of his preface: “I have not time to examine every sheet of your manuscript but have read many sheets in different parts of it: your general plan and execution I approve of, and can sincerely wish you success in your labours.” That was perfunctory, to be sure, but apparently useful enough to Elliott, since by then Webster’s name was well known, chiefly owing to his spelling book.¹¹

Caleb Alexander’s 550-page dictionary was far more successful. It announced on its title page that it contained “many new words peculiar to the United States.” As Webster had been and would be again, Alexander was roasted by conservative American critics for that innovation because, as we shall see, the concept of a dictionary of American English was in many people’s mind of quite a different and threatening order than a dictionary that was merely printed in America and faithfully recorded British English. Because of its Americanisms such as caucus, chipmunk, lengthy, moccasin, and wigwam, one reviewer called Alexander’s book a “disgusting collection” dragged in from “the boors of each local jurisdiction in the United States.”

3

When he got down to it, Webster grabbed an edition of Johnson’s dictionary and began to make notes in its margins. By June 1805, he was confiding to Mathew Carey, a Philadelphia bookseller and friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, that he “had been engaged for some time in preparing to give an improved dictionary of the language and, as a preliminary step, have been learning the Anglo-Saxon, the mother tongue of the present English.” He also intimated to another bookseller in August that he was already “compiling a larger work,” a dictionary, that he was confident would banish Johnson for good. He had finally chosen the path that would determine the rest of his life.¹²

In February 1806, he came out with A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in New Haven by Hudson and Goodwin. By compendious, Webster meant concise, intended for the general public, not for schools. It contains a lexicon of 355 pages; 53 pages of tables, charts, and statistics at the end; and 40,600 entry words, all except 5,000 of them plucked out of John Entick’s spelling dictionary of 1764. It was succeeded the following year by his abridged school edition, “omitting obsolete and technical terms, and reducing it to a dollar book,” from the profits of which he hoped to finance his work on a “complete dictionary” that he was then telling himself he could finish in three to five years. In his preface to the Compendious Dictionary, Webster speaks unapologetically to the public directly, much of which he knew was hostile to the entire idea of an “American” dictionary: “Men who take pains to find . . . proofs of our national inferiority in talents and acquirements, are certainly not destined to decide the ultimate fate of [this] performance.” He was determined “to make one effort to dissolve the charm of veneration for foreign authors which fascinates the mind of men in this country, and holds them in the chains of illusion.”

He makes sure to devote a large part of this preface to explaining the mistakes he claims Dr. Johnson and other British lexicographers had made in orthography, pronunciation, definitions, and etymology. He asserts that his dictionary is innovative, with a lexicon containing more than five thousand entry words not in Johnson—and its rejection of many words that Johnson had included and that Webster maintained either were not part of the functioning language (written or spoken) or were inadmissible (such as fart, turd, and sexual terms) because they were “vulgar” (i.e., “low,” “mean,” “common”) and “offensive” to moral sensibilities. It also includes several American tables and lists “for the benefit of the merchant, the student, and the traveller.” Such tables had long been a staple feature of several English dictionaries since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the more elaborate and detailed way Webster introduced them, they represented what became a new and distinctly American contribution to the history of dictionaries of English. The tables enabled a dictionary to function as a comprehensive reference source regarding money and currency, proper names, poetic fictions, classical mythology, geographical information such as capitals of states and countries, weights and measures, and biblical information, to name but a few categories.¹³

Most of all, Webster’s preface broadcasts that his Compendious Dictionary is a bold push to Americanize lexicography. Several thousand entry words, he claims, were drawn from American life: jargon; provincialisms and Native American loanwords (e.g., skunk, snowshoe, tomahawk, wampum); the language of law and government (advocate, congressional, constitutionality, departmental, docket, irrepealability, presidency); industry and commerce (cent, customable, dime, dollar, dutiable, irredeemable); technology and science (aeri-form, alkaline, electrometer, gazometer, platina, pyrometer); medicine (vaccination); agriculture (rattoons, verbs such as to gin, to girdle); geography; proper names; and, generally, the details of American culture. But in the face of the hostility and mockery he had encountered, he hoped that much of his readership would understand that he had backed off somewhat from his proposed spelling reforms for America. (Actually, he only slightly moderated them, retaining such innovations as aker for acre and wimmen, which he describes as “the primitive and correct orthography” for the plural of woman). Regarding orthography, he now concedes, “No great changes should ever be made at once,” but he insists that his reforms must proceed with “such gradual changes, as shall accommodate the written to the spoken language . . . especially when they purify words from corruptions, improve the regular analogies of a language, and illustrate etymology.”¹⁴

Webster’s readers did notice a variety of inconsistencies in his banishment of certain letters in words, such as double letters in polysyllabic words and the final k in words like logick. These were early days in his journey into lexicography, however. He had firm ideas about the language, as he stated in his Dissertations, but he was not able to execute them consistently as a lexicographer. Compounding this was the reality that the spelling of some individual words, and classes of words, were in a transitional stage in both Britain and America. As a result, from place to place in his works, and from time to time, he might simply have tried to accommodate variant spellings. In his monumental book The English Language in America (1925), George Philip Krapp pointed out that inconsistency was a major flaw in Webster’s system of reforms: many of them were based on nothing more than his personal opinion, and he changed his mind from one part of the dictionary to another. “One may question,” he writes, “the advisability of making an elementary dictionary, or in fact a dictionary of any kind, the exponent of theories of reform in spelling, but if this is done, the reforms ought to be carried through systematically and formally, not merely suggested here and there as preferences of the compilers. In this book Webster wrought mainly as an educator, not as an unbiased recorder of words, and he seems to have introduced his reforms more or less casually with the intent of showing what he thought American spelling ought to be, not what it was.”¹⁵ Webster stated that although Benjamin Franklin had asked him “to prosecute his [Franklin’s] scheme of a reformed alphabet, and offered me his [printing] types for the purpose,” he had “declined his offer, on a full conviction of the utter impracticality as well as inutility of the scheme.” Krapp’s take on this was that “Webster was above all a practical, not a theoretical reformer. Even while he was toying with the idea of a phonetic alphabet, he was engaged in preparing and advertising for the public his elementary books of instruction for which no sale could have been expected, had they made use of an invented phonetic alphabet.”¹⁶

Nor did Webster appear any longer to value a fixed, unifying standard of pronunciation for an entire nation that he championed in his Dissertations, to be achieved through new rules that would purge it completely of dialect and what he called “barbaric” regional variations. With both British and American patterns of pronunciation in mind, he continues in the dictionary’s preface: “the rules of lexicographers and the practice of poets are utterly disregarded by the bulk of the nation; who regulate and will forever regulate, their practice by a decided preference of sounds—that is, by what may be termed the natural accent. To oppose this popular preference of a natural, easy, English accent, is as fruitless, as it is destructive of the uniformity of pronunciation and the beauties of speaking.” That last sentence, however, is vague and depends on what he means by a “popular” “natural accent.” It looks as if he is thinking of dialect there, “a decided preference for sounds”; if so, opposing it, of course, would not tend to destroy “uniformity of pronunciation.” On the contrary, according to his earlier Dissertations, opposing local accents would tend to support the notion of uniformity. Webster systematically runs through Johnson and the pronunciation of most of the other British lexicographers—William Kenrick, John Walker, Sir William Jones, Robert Nares, John Entick, Thomas Sheridan—to illustrate where each of them has gone astray and how they disagree with each other, contributing to a virtual Babel of mixed sounds. To demonstrate how misleading it is to rely on any of them as a guide, he includes a table showing their varying pronunciations of several words. He instead takes comfort in his notion that “the common unadulterated pronunciation of the New England gentleman”—his own pronunciation, in fact—was how most English people spoke before the likes of Sheridan, Walker, and Jones had corrupted that aspect of the harmonious uniformity and stability of the English language.¹⁷

In short, Webster found himself in a sea of inconsistencies and shifting currents in the language, within both Britain and America, and between them. He was still ready to chastise his British lexicographical forerunners but with a diminishing sense of his role, and ability, to control and direct the language. He was on more secure ground with his definitions, which are brief and simple, for example, cant: “corrupt or whining talk, a turn”; caucus: “cant name of secret meetings”; constitutional: “the state of being agreeable to the constitution, or of affecting the constitution”; electrician: “one versed in electricity”; foliage: “pertaining to or growing from a leaf”; hickory: “a tree, a species of walnut”; slang: “vulgar language, cant phrases”; woman (verb): “to make pliant like a woman.” Unlike what lies ahead in Webster’s dictionaries, the definitions contain little in the way of personal, moral, religious, political, and social themes; nor is there any etymology included in the definitions, although he speaks of it in general terms in his preface.

Five months after publication of the Compendious Dictionary, Josiah Quincy, who later became president of Harvard, told Webster he would be well advised not to seek reviews, not at least “until it has gotten into more hands, which it will in a short period I think, gradually. Some man of sarcastic temperature may thereby be stimulated to exercise himself upon it and thus give it a temporary unpopularity.” There were not many reviews, in fact, but Quincy was too late anyway: negative ones had already appeared by the time he warned Webster. One in the newspaper in July 1806 took him to task severely, with “malignity,” Webster thought, for his spellings. His sympathetic brother-in-law Thomas Dawes (married to Rebecca’s sister), later chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, recommended “a middle path” between him and his critics, confessing some irritation of his own at Webster’s spellings: “Chooseday for Tuesday I cannot bear, and as to keind [for kind], it sits worse on my stomach than Indian Root.” Webster had asked for support from John Quincy Adams, then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard and later the sixth president of the United States, but Adams sent him back a personal but cool assessment in November after reading another harsh review in the Albany Sentinel that censured Webster’s spelling, pronunciation, and inclusion of “vulgar words.” Adams thought Webster was far too radical: “A patriotic spirit will from a sense of duty encourage domestic manufactures, but to prescribe their use by LAW, and to prohibit the introduction of them from Great Britain, is at least of more questionable policy, and perhaps not quite so practicable. . . . Alterations of spelling or of pronunciation upon the authority of a single writer have an inevitable tendency to introduce confusion into a language.” Adams was worried: “I am apprehensive that your example and authority may produce a similar inconvenience to the writers and speakers of English. . . . I would neither adopt or reject a mode of spelling or pronunciation either from deference or resistance to the English Court or Stage.” He advised Webster to “shun all controversy on the subject.” As for Webster’s nationalistic lexicography, Adams did not “deem it proper to engage national prejudices or passions in the Cause,” especially directed against Britain; and he was definitely against “hunting up” regional vocabulary and words with a short lifespan for inclusion in a dictionary of “classical English.” “Between vulgarism and propriety of speech some line must be drawn. . . .” That pretty much said it all. Adams was not ready to recommend that Harvard “pledge its support” to his “system” of spelling and pronunciation and the “departure from the English language.” Harvard did not support Webster, in fact, until more than half a century later. There would, however, be more fertile ground in New Haven.¹⁸

By November 1807, Webster was reeling from the wounds inflicted by reviews. It was not a good place to be, he admitted, to have most of the newspaper and magazine editors against him. “We have, to oppose us,” he informed Barlow, with whom he had been corresponding about orthography and neologisms in the American language, “the publishers of most of the popular periodical works in our large towns,” all of whom “repose implicit confidence in Johnson’s opinions” and are “arrayed against me and my designs.” One of the most important reviews appeared in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review in October 1809, delayed more than three years partly because the editors did not want to be drawn into the middle of the furor of Webster’s making. It is harsh. “In fifty, or perhaps a hundred of our village schools,” it begins, “this Compendious Dictionary of Mr. Webster is insinuating suspicions of the definitions of Johnson, justifying ridiculous violations of grammar, and spreading hurtful innovations in orthography.” It goes on from there to refer to Webster’s “twenty years warfare” over orthography and calls him “the wildest innovator of an age of revolutions.”¹⁹

Without giving examples, Webster complained to his friend the distinguished scientist, physician, and politician Samuel Latham Mitchill that the English approved of aspects of his dictionary more than did the Americans. (Webster was annoyed that Mitchill himself, in fact, had failed to remark on it.) This only made him more irritated with his own nation, “perhaps . . . the only country on the globe where men are determined not to have their errors disturbed, where men fix their opinions upon a particular standard without knowing whether it is right or wrong and grow angry at the man who proves it inaccurate.” In Great Britain there is “far more liberality,” he added, in an apparently breathtaking turnaround in his views of a country he once called a “harlot,” “and if I had not a family, I would quit a country where men who propose improvements on certain books are sure to be abused.” This is not a “patriotic” sentiment, to be sure, but it is one that does highlight his resentment and frustration over the wave of disapproval that had greeted his first dictionary.²⁰