4

Displacing Delilah

Money was indeed a problem. Webster had been receiving a little more income from his speller after a few of his rights to royalties had reverted back to him in 1804, but his family had grown, and with it, his expenses. His 1806 dictionary was yielding scarcely any income. “Even now my resources are inadequate to the work,” he told Joel Barlow in November 1807; “my income barely supports my family, and I want five hundred dollars’ worth of books from Europe which I cannot obtain here and which I cannot afford to purchase.” One way to raise money was through subscriptions to the intended dictionary. Two or three hundred, he felt, would be all he needed. But people were frightened off by his extreme views and ways of expressing them, his drive to “overturn, overturn.”¹ Barlow, incidentally, was feeling rather good about himself just then, publishing his poem The Columbiad that year, a visionary but turgid national epic of American history that for a time looked to become a foundational text for the United States, although in the end it did not.

Webster’s editorial vantage point after 1808 became more complicated by his religious “awakening” to “the doctrines of the Christian faith,” impelled partly by his desire to join the rest of his family in public Calvinist worship. If he had kept his conversion private, it would not have affected the reception of his work, but in July 1809 he felt compelled to publish in the Panoplist a lengthy explanation of how he had arrived at his current religious stance. Although many appreciated his “apologia” and wrote to tell him so, many others (especially Massachusetts Unitarians, notably at Harvard) were spooked that his judgment would now be complicated by religious zeal, further distorting his handling of the language—that “your own sentiments [“peculiar doctrine”] would get into the work, as the true and only definition,” wrote his brother-in-law Dawes. Krapp’s take on the influence of Webster’s religious conversion on his lexicography signals the problem: “In short, it was really spiritual, not phonological truth in which Webster was primarily interested, and he seems to have thought . . . that the truth of a word, that is the primitive and original radical value of the word, was equivalent to the truth of the idea.”²

Nor did Webster retreat from his anti-Johnson campaign. David Ramsay’s warning to him about Boston in August 1807—that “prejudices against any American attempts to improve Dr. Johnson are very strong in that city”—only fanned the embers of his smoldering resentment. Webster ignored the admonition and responded by bombarding Ramsay with a vigorous twelve-page letter, following that up immediately with a thirty-two-page pamphlet, A Letter to Dr. Ramsay, of Charleston (S.C.) Respecting the Errors in Johnson’s Dictionary and Other Lexicons. The pamphlet only deepened the existing bias against his lexicographical ambitions. Nothing Johnson did lexicographically was right, Webster wrote in his letter to Ramsay, and the “blind admiration” Americans had for him was stunting their intellectual growth, serving as “the insidious Delilah by which the Samsons of our country are shorn of their locks. . . . Johnson’s Dictionary . . . furnishes no standard of correct English, but in its present form tends very much to corrupt and pervert the language. . . . Johnson has transgressed the rules of lexicography beyond any other compiler; for his work contains more of the lowest of all vulgar words than any other now extant. . . .” That was a risky claim, given that Webster certainly did not undertake an exhaustive search for vulgar words through a long line of eighteenth-century dictionaries. He went on, “Let the admirers of Johnson’s Dictionary be a little more critical in comparing his vocabulary and mine and blush for their illiberal treatment of me!” John Jay, former president of the Continental Congress and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, one of the few people who sent Webster subscription money, cheered him on but also sobered him by telling him his efforts to gain subscriptions were hampered by considerable apprehension that his dictionary would “impair” the sameness of the English language and its orthography in Britain and America, and that most people were biased against it because of that. As Webster makes quite clear in his Dissertations on the English Language, “As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language.” He was not about to let John Jay or any nostalgic defenders of British English, nor the principle that the “sameness” of the language in the two countries should be preserved, persuade him to abandon that mission just so he could obtain subscriptions.³

Webster’s views and methods, the size of the dictionary, the costs—they all worked against his obtaining subscriptions. “Many men are loth to advance money for a book to be finished 12 years hence,” Dawes insisted, “when the author may be impaired or in his grave.” His old Yale classmate Oliver Wolcott told him bluntly, “I cannot encourage you to expect success by means of a popular subscription, unless the public impressions are different in other places, from what they are in New York.” They were not, at least not in cities and large towns. Webster’s circular letter dated February 17, 1807, “To the Friends of Literature in the United States,” soliciting “gentlemen of property” for subscriptions, brought none. He may have turned still more people against the project with his extravagant claims of having studied the Hebrew, Celtic, and “Teutonic” languages and thus obtained what he described as his unmatchable command of the history of the English language. It was the tone of his plea for subscriptions, as if he were the unappreciated resident prophet of American lexicography in the country, that tended to put people off. “The imperfections and inaccuracies of the best English dictionaries have been long known and regretted by men of letters in Great Britain,” he wrote, and some philologists are trying to “supply the defect,” but “by men incompetent to the task.” With the “valuable materials” he has collected, he proposed to remedy this deplorable situation, once and for all, with his dictionary. In the middle of all this, he was brought down to earth by his father, Noah Webster Sr., who wrote to him in June 1807 asking for a loan of $10 to $20 to pay for “post and rails” needed for a new fence on the farm. Webster did send his father $10, which he could ill afford. Increasingly desperate, two years later he even petitioned James Madison, soon to become president of the United States, for some sort of appointment in Europe with a “considerable emolument” so he could gain access to books he had no hope of finding in America. Nothing came of that request either—just as well, perhaps, because it is improbable that Rebecca would have allowed him to uproot his young family by moving to another country.⁴

Letters from him followed one after another for years, public and private, complaining, protesting, imploring, explaining, justifying, and boasting. All he could do was “trudge on,” the lonely warrior, resilient and undefeated: “The labor requisite to accomplish the work upon my plan is certainly double to that which Dr. Johnson bestowed upon his dictionary. My etymological inquiries alone . . . will probably incur as much labor as the whole execution of Johnson’s works.”⁵

2

In the meantime, his money was running out, and there was no alternative but to leave New Haven and settle somewhere less expensive so that he could “get bread for my children.” He sold his New Haven house and in 1812 purchased a “humble cottage in the country”—in fact, a sizable house—in the sleepy farming town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where he could continue working “with comfort” and fewer distractions. Rebecca was supportive but distraught. Their daughters wept on leaving New Haven.⁶

Once settled in the large study of his new home, from which he looked out across the town “green” to what now is Amherst College, an institution he would help to establish (he delivered the address at the laying of the cornerstone of Amherst College in August 1820 and became president of its board of trustees), he immediately began work on his magnum opus. That study became his dictionary room. He placed in it what became a legendary round table he brought with him from New Haven. His daughter Eliza many years later remembered the table, the room, and her father working in it:

In the second story of his new home, in a large room, with windows looking to the south and east, Webster set up anew the large circular table which he had used for some years at New Haven. This table was about two feet wide, built in the form of a hollow circle. Dictionaries and grammars of all obtainable languages were laid in successive order upon its surface. Webster would take the word under investigation, and standing at the right end of the lexicographer’s table, look it up in the first dictionary which lay at that end. He made a note, examined a grammar, considered some kindred word, and then passed to the next dictionary of some other tongue. He took each word through the twenty or thirty dictionaries, making notes of his discoveries, and passing around his table many times in the course of a day’s labor of minute and careful study.

The “hollow” part of this doughnut-shaped table was the space inside the circle into which Webster could walk through a small opening.⁷

3

He was ready for work but decided to devote himself first to sorting out once and for all the etymology of the language. It was a detour of monumental proportions, ten long years of fantastic conjectures that virtually froze his progress on the main body of the dictionary. He saw his decade of intensive research, however, as a substantial breakthrough in etymological understanding. By 1813, he was collating, as he put it, “the radical words [the form of a word without the affixes or morphemes that are used to make other words] in 20 languages, including the seven Asiatic languages or dialects of the Assyrian stocks.” He had happened on a “field entirely new,” he claimed, which was true in the sense that all preceding dictionaries were woefully inadequate in their etymologies.⁸

Webster embarked on the study of etymology without much more than a negligible familiarity with the scientifically based philological research in Europe that was breaking new and revolutionary ground in the history of languages. Johnson’s young friend Sir William Jones (1746–94), at age twenty-six one of England’s most promising orientalists, may be said to have inaugurated the study of modern philology with his pioneering discoveries regarding ancient Hindu Sanskrit and its relationship to the family of languages known as Indo-European. The German linguists Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Franz Bopp (1791–1867) had begun doing major work in this field well before Webster plunged headlong into his version of etymology. Their work on the relationship of Sanskrit to the grammatical forms of Indo-European languages was fairly well known by English philologists by 1820.⁹

Unlike William Jones, who had done important work on the roles of vowels in the making of languages, Webster virtually ignored vowels in tracing the evolution of language: “little or no regard is to be had to them, in ascertaining the origin and affinity of languages.” He was more comprehensively rebelling against language historians in general who, like Jones, angered Webster by remarking, “I beg leave, as a philologer, to enter my protest against conjectural etymology in historical researches, and principally against the licentiousness of etymologists in transposing and inserting letters, in substituting at pleasure any consonant for another of the same order, and in totally disregarding the vowels.” If Webster had heeded that protest, he might have saved himself much of his work during those tedious ten years, though doubtless he benefited from the exercise as he propelled himself daily around his dictionary table from one bilingual dictionary of Semitic and European languages to another on the principle of radicals and roots: that “a radical identity between two words [exists] if they exhibit only a moderate degree of similarity in their consonantal structure.” He also believed the biblical account of God’s confounding languages at the Tower of Babel, and he was convinced all languages had their origins in the ancient languages—Shemitic or Semitic (Shem supposedly was the oldest son of the biblical Noah), Japhetic (Japheth supposedly was the third son of Noah), and Chaldean (the Aramaic vernacular of the Semitic people of Babylonia). He remained dogmatic, not likely to have listened to Jones or any of the German philologists, even if he had been more aware of their research and discoveries in this field. While his methodology was herculean but unscientific, he convinced himself it was thoroughly systematic. And having spent many years searching for the casual external similarities of words, he was not about give it all up in deference to European philologists who did not have, he felt, an inside track to the final answer. Years later, in 1839, he wrote this in his address to the Mercantile Library Association: “In this branch of etymology, even the German scholars, the most accurate philologists in Europe, appear to be wholly deficient. To this investigation I devoted ten years, and my reward is ample.”¹⁰

If not from learned Americans, the learned English elite, or German philologists, where did Webster get much of his inspiration for his etymological journey? It was, surprisingly, from England in the late eighteenth century, but certainly not from English traditional views of language and education. His English linguistic and etymological hero, so to speak, was John Horne Tooke, a learned English political agitator and erratic member of Parliament who, incidentally, reviled the dictionary compiled by his contemporary, Dr. Johnson, and has been described as “one of the most systematically frantic etymologists who ever lived.” In his Dissertations on the English Language, Webster confesses “an affection” for Horne Tooke, who was influential as a linguist because in his book Diversions of Purley (1786) he promoted the radical idea that the origins of language could philosophically be discovered by unscientific, almost mystical, speculation over the etymologies of words. He drew conclusions from the superficial resemblance of words. In this regard he played his part in retarding the development of English philology; he also made, as we shall see, an unfortunate and wasteful impression on Noah Webster. Webster was particularly drawn to Horne Tooke because at the root of the latter’s linguistic ideas was the conservative principle that the plain speech of the common man could be traced to Anglo-Saxon, not to Latin and Greek. As the scholar Marilyn Butler puts it, John Horne Tooke “set the comparative study of language on an eccentric course in England just when philology was taking off in Germany.” An inspiration for Webster, and as we shall see, also for Webster’s emerging rival, the influential English lexicographer Charles Richardson, Horne Tooke defiantly turned his back on the considerably exciting philological discoveries the Germans had already made.¹¹

4

Attacks on Webster’s work continued. A major one, already mentioned, came in 1816 in the form of an address by John Pickering, philologist, politician, and jurist, to the distinguished American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Webster, however, read it later in Pickering’s analysis of the “present state of the English language” when it appeared in print as the preface to Pickering’s Vocabulary. Pickering listed certain “provincialisms” or “Americanisms”—these included new words, old words with new meanings, and local words by then obsolete in England—of which he thought the public should be more aware. A firm believer in British authority and the “purity” of the language inherited by America, he advocated that “Americanisms” unknown to intelligent and educated Americans (and British)—described by one contemporary British reviewer as “barbarous phraseology”—should never be given the legitimacy of inclusion in a dictionary. In effect, Pickering’s book amounted to a rejection of much of what Webster stood for: “I expect to encounter the displeasure of our American reformers, who think we ought to throw off our native tongue as one of the badges of English servitude, and establish a new tongue for ourselves.” The “best scholars in our country treat such a scheme with derision,” Pickering insisted; to turn our backs on “a language which is common to ourselves and the illustrious writers and orators of our mother country,” would be madness. It would not have pleased Webster to know that after Pickering’s address to the academy, Thomas Dawes had rushed up to him in great excitement and said, “There! That is what I have been trying to bring my brother Webster to agree to; but he won’t do it!”¹²

Webster took his revenge the following year in A Letter to the Honorable John Pickering—not a private letter to Pickering but a published pamphlet of no fewer than sixty-four pages. He challenges Pickering word-by-word, indignantly assailing the resistance that Pickering had thrown into his path toward becoming America’s great language reformer. He coaxes his argument inevitably into the realm of morality: “I deprecate the effects of a blind acquiescence in the opinions of men and the passive reception of every thing that comes from a foreign press. My mind revolts at the reverence for foreign authors which stifles inquiry, restrains investigation, benumbs the vigor of the intellectual faculties, subdues and debases the mind. I regret to see the young Hercules of genius in America chained to his cradle.” He had read Pickering’s Vocabulary with quivering anger, especially when he came to an insulting allusion he was certain was to himself: “in this country, as in England, we have thirsty reformers and presumptuous sciolists, who would unsettle the whole of our admirable language for the purpose of making it conform to their whimsical notions of propriety.” Webster now pretends not to care. “Whether you number me with the thirsty reformers and presumptuous sciolists [people who traffic in superficial knowledge],” he writes, “is a fact I shall take no pains to discover, nor if known, would the fact give me the smallest concern.” But he is outraged that anyone should have the temerity to pick on him like that, the self-appointed savior of the American language. He lashes out with a passage against Pickering’s “dictatorial authority” that, with a little pause and some reflection, might have occurred to him could apply to himself at least as much as to Pickering: “The man who undertakes to censure others for the use of certain words and to decide what is or is not correct in language seems to arrogate to himself a dictatorial authority, the legitimacy of which will always be denied.”¹³

It also irks him that Pickering was straying into territory he had staked out as his own. He denies Pickering’s charge that he is out to “unsettle” the language by recording and promoting differences between the languages of the two countries. He maintains that he is not the enemy of Britain: “I venerate the men and their writings,” he announces. “I venerate the literature, the laws, the institutions, and the charities of the land of my fathers.” But if called to battle, he will fight: “I wish to be on good terms with the English: it is in my interest and the interest of my fellow citizens to treat them as friends and brethren. But I will be neither frowned nor ridiculed into error. . . . I will examine subjects for myself. . . . If I must measure swords with their travellers and their reviewers . . . I shall not decline the combat.” He concludes on a lugubrious note, complaining that Americans are already forgetting what he had done for the country, but he holds out some hope for himself, his books, and the nation: “I have contributed in a small degree to the instruction of at least four millions of the rising generation; and it is not unreasonable to expect that a few seeds of improvement planted by my hand may germinate and grow and ripen into valuable fruit when my remains shall be mingled with the dust.”¹⁴

5

By November 1821, Webster had reached the letter H in his dictionary. He had also completed a “Synopsis of the Principal Words in Twenty Languages,” in which he recorded his etymological conclusions for an appendix to the dictionary, a piece of scholarship that would never be published—it presently languishes in the archives of the New York Public Library. He hoped to finish in five years, but his isolation worried him, “retired from libraries and from men of erudition, whose aid I want and must have in revising the work.” A move to either Boston or back to New Haven, where there were more books available, therefore became necessary, and he thought he might even have to visit Europe, especially England, where he could seek out the books he needed and perhaps even secure a publisher with the correct assortment of types for foreign languages that the book would require and were not available in America. John Jay sent him money in 1821, but he needed far more patronage from wealthy men than was forthcoming. By his reckoning he had already spent $25,000 of his own money on it, money of which his family had been deprived during its years of greatest need when the children were growing up.¹⁵

It helped his finances that the family ranks in Amherst had thinned. In 1813, Webster’s daughter Emily married William Ellsworth, who would become governor of Connecticut and a Supreme Court justice, and moved to Hartford. And in 1816, his daughter Julia married Chauncey Allen Goodrich, an impressive young tutor at Yale studying for the ministry. The following year Goodrich became a professor of rhetoric at Yale, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Elizur Goodrich, and he and his wife settled in New Haven. Ellsworth and Goodrich, but especially the astute Goodrich, would both figure prominently in the dictionary wars in the ensuing years.

6

Rebecca favored New Haven, so in 1822 they returned there. Their daughter Eliza recalled the reasons the family left Amherst for New Haven in a letter to her sister Emily in 1885: “I do know one reason why Father left Amherst because he several times mentioned it before me. He intended going to Europe & wished to leave Mother & Louise [another sister, with some intellectual disabilities] under the protection of brother & sister [Julia] Goodrich. The comfort which sister Julia could give to Mother he appreciated, & then too he needed the aid of books from the Yale library.” They first rented a small house and then, evidently intending this move to be permanent, Webster built a larger house on the corner of Temple and Grove Streets, a good location close to the hub of college life—next to where many of Webster’s archives lie today at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They were delighted to be back in New Haven. Rebecca was glad to be with her old friends again and living close to Julia. And Webster’s proximity now to his resourceful son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich would become crucial to the fate of his dictionary in both useful and painful ways.¹⁶

Returning to the dictionary in New Haven without the tangled distractions of further etymological forays into other languages, he worked hard and made rapid progress, reaching the letter R by December 1823. He soon became convinced, however, of his need to travel to France and England to complete his work. “I rejoice that a man of your uncommon learning and facility of Investigation is not to give up his great Dictionary; but you must feel younger [at sixty-five] than I do,” Dawes wrote to him in February 1824, “to carry the manuscript across the Atlantic.” His friend William Cranch, a federal judge and the nephew of Abigail Adams, thought it was a fine idea to travel where his work surely would be better appreciated: “I have no doubt that your labours will be more justly estimated in England than they have been here. The greatest difficulty will be to make them believe it possible that any man but an Englishman can obtain a knowledge of the English language. This Country [America] has not given you credit for one half your merit as a literary character, because you have been so unbending to the prejudices of our literary men.”¹⁷

He left for Paris on June 15, 1824, accompanied by his twenty-two-year-old son, William, who was to serve as his copyist. He did not much like France. At the royal library, which later became the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, he managed to examine “the latest works on the physical sciences,” where he found “the new terms . . . I have been seeking for my dictionary,” but he was out of place and uncomfortable. Someone he knew from home saw him in his Paris hotel one morning, an unmistakable, darkly-clothed New Englander, and later wrote: “I saw a tall, slender form, with a black coat, black small-clothes, black silk stockings, moving back and forth, with its hands behind it, and evidently in a state of meditation. It was a curious, quaint, Connecticut looking apparition, strangely in contrast to the prevailing forms and aspects in this gay metropolis. I said to myself—‘If it were possible, I should say that was Noah Webster!’ I went up to him, and found it was indeed he. At the age of sixty-six he had come to Europe to perfect his Dictionary.”¹⁸

After little more than two not very productive months in Paris, Webster crossed the Channel to Brighton, England, headed for Cambridge University, where he intended to spend the winter consulting books in the library and completing the writing of his dictionary. He had written to Professor Samuel Lee at Trinity College, professor of Arabic and Hebrew languages, and himself a brilliant philologist and lexicographer—he became Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1831—stating he would be coming. William wrote to his mother that for their ride to Cambridge they preferred to hire “a private conveyance” of “a chariot and a couple of horses” rather than have to endure “a hasty ride in a crowded stage coach.” It did not take Webster long to be disillusioned with Cambridge. William wrote to his mother, “My father is almost discouraged on account of the character Professor Lee gives of the inhabitants of Cambridge. According to his description of the people, and his account is confirmed by other respectable inhabitants, the morals of the greater part of the population are wretchedly depraved.” They had not arranged to stay in one of the Cambridge colleges, so they had no choice but to obtain lodgings, consisting of “a parlor & two bedrooms,” in the town for eight months. The appearance of the college buildings themselves did not seem to have pleased them either: “old stone buildings, which look very heavy, cold & gloomy to an American accustomed to the new public buildings in our country.” As for books, which was the reason he came abroad, he seemed to be getting them from wherever he could, from a bookseller’s library in town for a quarterly payment, the university library, and probably from Trinity College library.¹⁹

Professor Lee may not have fully understood why the Websters were in Cambridge in the first place. At any rate, Lee was ill for much of their time there, so the one potential contact for introducing them to the faculty was largely out of circulation until nearly the end of their stay. Webster had hoped to engage a few of the faculty in discussions about the language, but for most of his time in Cambridge he was almost totally neglected. He did make an effort to overcome his isolation, however. In a more accommodating mood than he usually demonstrated when railing against the British and their language, he retreated from his dogmatic position in the Dissertations that Americans must have no interest in encouraging a sameness between their language and that of Britain. He wrote to Professor Lee suggesting a meeting of Oxford and Cambridge scholars, in which he would play a part, to the end of bringing about “some agreement or coincidence of opinions in regard to unsettled points in pronunciation and grammatical construction” and “the evils of our irregular orthography”: “The English language is the language of the United States; and it is desirable that as far as the people have the same things and the same ideas, the words to express them should remain the same.” One can imagine the Cambridge response to this virtually unknown American on his first visit to England—unknown at least to the Cambridge dons—suggesting such a major overhaul of the language. In any case, for the most part he was ignored. Not until late January 1825 did several Fellows of Trinity College finally discover him and regret they had not met him earlier; and at about that time Lee’s health improved enough to enable him to read Webster’s “Synopsis” and declare himself “much interested in the ingenuity of [Webster’s] remarks.” So far as we know, that seems to have been the extent of his interest in Webster’s work. Webster told Rebecca on December 6, “I have no reason to be discouraged nor to regret the voyage, as yet, but I have some months labor yet to perform.” By nearly the end of their visit, though, Webster and his son were enjoying themselves. Cambridge was, after all, “a place endeared to us . . . by an acquaintance with some interesting families and some gentlemen of the University, whose uniform kindness to us will form a pleasurable source of recollections of this venerable seat of literature and science.”²⁰

In his relative academic solitude, Webster soldiered on, William proving to be extremely helpful by transcribing the entire manuscript into a fair copy. “He devotes most of his time to copying for me,” Webster reassured Rebecca. The day after Christmas 1824, he wrote again, “William is gone to the Chapel for evening service. His eyes have been weaker these three weeks past, owing to straining them by writing at night. But they are gaining strength.” He complained of pains in his own right hand, especially “the right thumb, the strength of which is almost exhausted. I am approaching the end of my work, & by care, I hope to have strength to proceed, without interruption.”²¹

Much sooner apparently than he expected, on a memorable day in January 1825, he completed the last word for his dictionary: zymome or zimome, which (apparently not mustering enough energy to elaborate) he defined simply as “one of the constituents of gluten.” It was a moment that almost overwhelmed him physically and emotionally: “I finished writing my Dictionary in January, 1825, at my lodgings in Cambridge, England. When I had come to the last word, I was seized with a trembling which made it somewhat difficult to hold my pen steady for writing. The cause seems to have been the thought that I might not then live to finish the work, or the thought that I was so near the end of my labor. But I summoned strength to finish the last word, & then walking about the room a few minutes I recovered.” “Worn out” with writing and eager to leave Cambridge for London, where he intended to find a publisher, he thought the odds were against him, for “it is uncertain what difficulties I may have to encounter from the prejudices of the English & from the interest which the principal booksellers have in Johnson’s dictionary by Todd.” He was referring to Henry John Todd’s revision of Johnson in 1818—there would be another Todd edition in 1827—and he was right. In London he met with indifference toward his work by scholars and booksellers alike. There was no use staying in England. If he was to secure a publisher, it would have to be in America. They sailed for home soon afterward, Webster clutching the manuscript he had struggled for twenty years to complete.²²

Webster arrived home in the early summer of 1825, buoyed up at first by the jubilation of his family and friends over his having completed his colossal work. As the months passed, however, he grew increasingly desperate that he could not find anyone to publish his dictionary. He was sixty-seven and tired, and a huge amount of editing and proofreading lay ahead of him. The expense involved before the public could read a single word he had written was daunting and a formidable deterrent to potential publishers and printers. It gradually dawned on him he might himself have to pay for his book’s publication, although this would mean severe financial hardship for his family from which they might never recover.

In late 1825 or early in 1826, his son-in-law Chauncey Allen Goodrich stepped in to help him find a publisher. He did not have far to look, offering the book to Sherman Converse, a native of Connecticut and enterprising young graduate of Yale in 1813 who had remained in New Haven and launched himself into the publishing business, first as editor of the Connecticut Journal and later by starting what soon became one of the largest publishing houses in New England. Webster might earlier have considered using Converse as his publisher and dismissed the idea because Converse had gained something of a dubious local reputation as a controversial and combative newspaper editor. Only four years earlier Converse had lost a major two-year court case in the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors (with two appeals) over a libel suit against him for slander as editor of the Connecticut Journal. “This Mr. Converse has scattered firebrands, arrows, and death,” declared the plaintiff’s attorney, adding that “he has aimed a fatal dart at the bosom of my client.” Converse’s tenaciousness was borne out by his publishing the proceedings of the trials in 1822, in which he boldly accused the court and the judge of playing politics.²³

Goodrich was not unduly bothered. He judged that with his Connecticut background Converse would be sympathetic to Webster’s dictionary and eager to publish it. He was correct. For Converse this was a unique opportunity that had fallen into his lap, one that was sure to widen his publishing interests outside Connecticut and have his name linked with what looked to be an unusually important book. Webster felt relieved, although he was compelled to pay a sum out of his own pocket because Converse did not have the resources to bear all the costs. What Converse lacked in publishing experience and reputation, however, as well as money, he more than made up for with audacity and energy. He wrote to numerous highly placed politicians, educators, and authors in search of patronage. Aiming for the jackpot, he enclosed samples of Webster’s lexicography together with his “Dictionary Prospectus” and boldly sent them off in February 1826 to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, pleading for a recommendation he hoped would generate some badly needed financial support. It had become obligatory by this time to mention—with a stiff dose of hyperbole—Webster’s untiring language service to the country across several decades: “Mr. W[ebster] has bestowed upon this work . . . almost 30 years of industrious labor” and “compiled a work which comprises more philological research than all the English Lexicon hitherto published, and which if published will do great credit to Mr. Webster and to our country.” Vastly more philological work on the English language had been done in England before Webster rose from his obscurity in Hartford, Connecticut, but never mind. If Jefferson would favor Converse with a generous response, “I may obtain sufficient patronage to lay it [the dictionary] before the public.” Jefferson, however, as we have seen, had never been a fan of Webster’s and had actually mocked him, so he was hardly likely to join in, even if he had been in better health—he died only five months after he received Converse’s letter. He replied to Converse, “worn down with age, infirmity and pain, my mind is no longer in a tone for such services. I can only therefore express my regret that I cannot be useful to you in that way. . . .” Too many people, like Jefferson, by then distrusted Webster’s self-promotion and prowess with the language, so money trickled in unimpressively.²⁴

Publication, moreover, was delayed no fewer than a couple of years by the laborious task of revision and editing that had been given to the meticulous James Gates Percival, another Yale graduate and resident of New Haven. Percival was a man of “shrinking and morbid sensitiveness,” a reclusive and temperamentally eccentric poet, accomplished linguist, geologist, and doctor. He lived penuriously in New Haven for most of his life, unconnected to Yale in any way since his graduation. He had matriculated at Yale at age sixteen and graduated in 1820 at the top of his class. After he acquired a degree in medicine there, he tried unsuccessfully to practice, attributing his failure to his poetry: “I got my name up for writing . . . verses and found myself ruined. When a person is really ill he will not send for a poet to cure him.” One of his classmates remarked about Percival, “I never knew one who could acquire correct knowledge quicker than Percival.” Another confirmed his reputation as an eccentric: “I think he had few acquaintances in college, though I never knew he had any enemies. The fact that his intercourse was so circumscribed was doubtless to be attributed to constitutional reserve, and not to the consciousness of his own superiority. Everybody looked upon him as a good-natured, sensitive, thoughtful, odd, gifted fellow.” On the recommendation of another of Webster’s sons-in-law, William Fowler, a classmate of Percival’s at Yale, Converse gave him the massive job of reading most of the proofs several times.²⁵

7

While he was involved in the tedious process of preparing his dictionary for the press, Webster became distraught again from what he regarded as the serious inadequacy of the American Copyright Act of 1790, which provided copyright protection for an initial period of only fourteen years and no protection whatever from the commercial competition of cheap pirated British books. The act also specified that if the author were to die during the term of copyright—a distinct possibility in the case of the seventy-year-old Webster—the copyright would lapse, and the author’s heirs after that would be denied any royalties. What Webster advocated was the extension of the initial term of copyright protection and the assignment of copyright to the author’s legal heirs, but his fondest hope was for Congress to legislate perpetual copyright to authors and their heirs.

In a letter to Daniel Webster (no relation), a member of the House of Representatives and soon to be a US senator, in 1826 he urged congressional action: “The right of a farmer and mechanic to the exclusive enjoyment and right of disposal of what they make or produce is never questioned,” he asserted, so why should not an author’s? It was not until December 1830 that at last a new copyright bill was successfully brought to a vote. It ensured an initial period of twenty-eight years of copyright, with the provision of inheritance of rights for heirs should the author die before those twenty-eight years elapsed. The heirs also had the option to renew copyright for another fourteen years after the first twenty-eight. This was not perpetual copyright for heirs, but it was a huge step forward. Authors all over the land rejoiced. Although many others had agitated for the legislation, Webster believed he was the chief reason for its passing, as he wrote to son-in-law Fowler on a visit to Washington, DC, in 1831, where he was lobbying politicians: “My presence here has, I believe, been very useful and perhaps necessary to the accomplishment of the object. . . . [I]t was necessary that something extra should occur to awaken” Congress’s attention, and his visit was it. The result convinced him that “my fellow citizens consider me as their benefactor and the benefactor of my country.” The lack of international copyright law, however, would not be redressed until long after Webster’s death, when Congress passed the International Copyright Act of 1891.²⁶

8

Percival was no average proofreader. He was a more competent scholar of etymology than Webster, said to have been able to read ten languages fluently. Independently, he had been studying the advanced etymological research of the German philologists and spotted numbers of Webster’s errors concerning etymology that he could not bring himself to pass over silently. One anonymous observer of Percival’s methods during this work described his habits: “He could only work in his own time and way. Nothing could be passed over until thoroughly finished; and the consequence was, that he would sometime spend days upon some single insignificant word, whose history, if attainable, was of no importance. In the meantime, printers, compositors, and proofreaders must be paid for standing idle. . . .”²⁷

Months went by. While the printing of the book continued, Percival plagued Webster with corrections he felt had to be made—as he put it, “obliged to correct the blunders of ignorance . . . I feel like the living tied to the dead.” Percival complained in July, “at the present rate of progression, it will be almost a life-interest with me.” Even Webster’s son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich appears to have been involved in assisting Percival by allowing him to consult his well-stocked library in his Yale rooms. One of Goodrich’s colleagues one day walked in on Percival reading in Goodrich’s rooms: “I occasionally saw him at Professor Goodrich’s rooms. He pursued his investigations standing by the side of the book-shelves; generally holding two or three books in his hands, having a pile of others collected at his feet, wearing on his head his ragged leather cap, usually keeping his back turned toward any persons in the room, and never, while I was present, speaking or raising his eyes from the work.”²⁸

By December, Percival was threatening to pull out under the strain, tired of Webster telling him he was being obsessive and pedantic. He worked nonstop every day until seven in the evening, then took the sheets he had corrected to a cranky Webster in order to “make revisions on his authorities, and settle with him the corrections.” “This has been my employment for most of six months,” he complained in December, “and I am now done with it. I cannot, and will not go through twenty months at least of such incessant labor; for it will take fully that time to finish. The world may cry out what they choose; but when I find myself bound by Gordian knots, I will cut them. Some arrangement must be made to lighten my task, or I shall resign it entirely. . . . My situation is therefore one of disgust and toil. . . . I regret that I have ever engaged in the thing. It will be one of the miseries of my life to think of it.” Converse raised his pay, gave him a few assistants, and the project inched its way to completion.²⁹

Webster’s frustration with Percival’s scrupulousness turned inevitably to anger. Converse angered him, too, since he was the one who had hired Percival. His patience at an end, he fired Percival. “I can only say that I was compelled to take the steps I did,” he wrote to Converse on May 23, 1828, just six months before publication, “for I am certain, had I not done it, I should ere this have been unfit for any superintendence of the dictionary. As it is, I am not certain that I shall not sink under the labor, before it is finished.” In his dictionary, he acknowledged Percival’s extensive help with a single vague reference. Fowler continued to help him with the proofreading, but his contribution was intermittent and not thorough. Webster’s own revision was haphazard. Without the continuation of Percival’s extremely detailed corrections and editing, many errors remained in the manuscript that came to haunt him in the months to come.³⁰

In the meantime, Webster and Converse began an advertising campaign inflated by extravagant promotional claims and spelling out exactly in what ways this dictionary would outshine existing British rivals. There would be twenty thousand words that had never before appeared in any dictionary, five thousand of which were scientific terms; “precise and technical definitions”; between thirty thousand and fifty thousand new senses and connotations of words; etymologies; and pronunciations that Webster maintained would substantiate his contention that the orthoepy, or pronunciation, of the language in the Englishman John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), then the chief authority on the subject in both Britain and America, was comprehensively incorrect. In his promotion of the publication, Webster cast Walker as his main antagonist, whom he characterized as no authority at all, even in Britain, and whose book he urged readers to avoid. This attack was the beginning of his war against other lexicographers besides Johnson. His own book, he announced, would stabilize both orthography and orthoepy in America for good by promoting sensible consistency, discouraging dialects, and declaring the independence of American pronunciation from English. Webster had long felt that one of the ways to achieve this consistency of pronunciation was to simplify and regularize spelling, since it was the present state of orthography that confused people as to how to pronounce words. Walker was making things worse with too much complexity, “too much niceness and exactness,” and “hypercritical fastidiousness” in his representation of sounds (especially of vowels) on the pages of his dictionary. Moreover, one of Walker’s greatest sins, Webster declared, was his alteration of spelling to bring it into line with the fashionable speech of English society. The Englishman Charles Richardson—more about him later—who was becoming Webster’s hostile lexicographical rival in America, as well as in England, on this point praised Webster’s new dictionary because its pages are “not disfigured by the appearance of such ill-looking vocables as are sometimes made to represent the sounds in other dictionaries.” Although Webster was advocating “sameness of pronunciation” throughout America, he was not advocating total segregation of the American from the English tongue. In his book on dictionaries and lexicographers, Chasing the Sun, Jonathon Green notes that in a letter to Queen Victoria in 1841 accompanying his gift to her of the second edition of the dictionary, Webster expressed his hope that “genuine descendants of English ancestors born on the west of the Atlantic, have not forgotten either the land or the language of their fathers.” Green comments on this: “It was all a far cry from the post-Revolutionary hothead of the 1780s.”³¹

But his son-in-law Goodrich was nervous about this assault on Walker’s authority in America. He wrote to Edward Everett to see what he thought. Everett’s reply to Goodrich has not been preserved, but in a letter to Webster about Walker in 1829, although he equivocated somewhat, he came down strongly in favor of Walker: “There can be no doubt . . . that Walker had access to the best sources of information, as to the fashionable pronunciation of the language. He was selected by Edmund Burke, as his son’s master in elocution. . . . Now where the actual usage of living societies is regarded as the standard, no book can be. The most that any book can aspire to do, is faithfully to record the usage, for the time being; and I must own that I am not acquainted with any other book, which appears to be so good a record of the pronunciation of our language as Walker’s.” As far as he knew, nobody by then had done a better job than Walker. In fact, on reading Webster’s dictionary, Everett turned squarely against Webster: “[W]e think the cases must be very rare, and present a very well admitted ambiguity, to authorize us, as Mr. Webster proposes, to resort to principles of the English language, in defiance of the received English pronunciation. We also deny wholly the propriety of making a distinction between the American usage and the English usage, as such, and the setting up of a standard for each.”³²

9

Webster’s large, unabridged dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, was published at last in December 1828. Priced at $20 (in the region of $450 today), its massive two quarto volumes contained almost two thousand pages and about seventy thousand entry words, almost twice as many as in his Compendious Dictionary and Walker’s latest edition. (As a reminder, a quarto is a large volume, suitable for unabridged dictionaries, formed by folding a printer’s sheet twice to produce four leaves or eight pages.) Webster did without many of Johnson’s illustrative quotations but ended up making his book even larger than Johnson’s by inflating his list with five categories of entry words that he specifies in his preface: “words of common use,” “participles of verbs,” “terms of frequent occurrence in historical works” (especially proper names), “legal terms,” and “terms in the arts and sciences.” Given his antipathy toward Johnson’s lexicography, by the way, it may seem surprising that on the title page Webster includes a quotation from the great moralist (without mentioning his name) taken from Rambler, no. 51: “He that wishes to be counted among the benefactors of posterity, must add, by his own toil, to the acquisitions of his ancestors.” Presumably, he also took note of another passage in that Rambler essay: “The man whose genius qualifies him for great undertakings, must at least be content to learn from books the present state of human knowledge,” so that “he may not ascribe to himself the invention of arts generally known.” Webster never again quoted Johnson on the title page of any of his dictionary editions.³³

The sprinkling of Americanisms—regardless of what Webster claims for them as contributing to his book’s American character—are few in number, about one-fifth of the figure he had boasted were contained in his Compendious Dictionary: “I have not been able to find many words, in respectable use, which can be so denominated.” His book’s chief claim to being American, he states, was its inclusion of new American senses of old words, though there were not many of those either. Still, his new title strategically stresses that this dictionary is an American product, designed, as he writes in his preface, “to furnish a standard of our [my italics] vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.” It was that word American in the title that angered many on both sides of the Atlantic, but which won him many more readers and supporters at home than otherwise he might have had. Paradoxically, the broad-mindedness or liberality of tastes and interests evident in Webster’s entry words and definitions is frequently offset by the provincialisms of a New England environment, which are out of place in what is supposed to be an American, not New England, dictionary. Take, for example, these pieces of homely wisdom and local custom—curfew: “This word is not used in America; although the practice of ringing a bell at nine o’clock continues in many places, and is considered in New England as a signal for people to retire from company to their own abode; and, in general, the signal is obeyed”; rail: “In New England we never call this series a rail, but by the general term railing”; sauce: “In New England culinary vegetables and roots eaten with flesh. Sauce consisting of stewed apples is a great article in some parts of New England; but cranberries make the most delicious sauce”; tackle: “To seize; to lay hold of; as, a wrestler tackles his antagonist; a dog tackles the game. This is a common popular use of the word in New England, though not elegant. But it retains the primitive idea, to put on, to fall or throw on.”³⁴

FIGURE 1.  This portrait of Noah Webster first appeared as a frontispiece in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. The image reappeared in later Webster editions for most of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, G. and C. Merriam Company Papers.

In his preface and introduction, Webster regales his readers with how his dictionary surpasses all previous dictionaries, touching on his advances in every department of lexicography. The English lexicographer Charles Richardson had other ideas. Like Webster, a follower of John Horne Tooke’s philological theories, Charles Richardson was one of the fiercest of Samuel Johnson’s critics and author of his own New Dictionary of the English Language (editions in 1835–37). He published his Illustrations to English Philology in 1815 (2nd ed., 1826), which contained a two hundred–page section titled “A Critical Examination of the Dictionary of Dr. Johnson,” a frontal attack on Johnson and defense of Horne Tooke’s Diversions. Richardson later found himself in competition with Webster, and in his New Dictionary severely condemns Webster for turning his back on “the elders of English lexicography in his own dictionaries.” He has particular fun at the expense of Webster’s etymology: “There is a display of oriental reading in his preliminary essays, which, as introductory to a dictionary of the English language seems as appropriate and useful as a reference to the code of gentoo [the indigenous people of India] laws to decide a question of English inheritance.” While he is on that scent, he sneaks in a dig at Webster’s alleged indifference to, and even ignorance of, English literature and his lack of literary taste in general: “Dr. Webster was entirely unacquainted with our old authors.” An exaggeration, to be sure, but it is largely correct, notwithstanding Webster’s claims of familiarity. Much of that, of course, was motivated by rivalry. Not one for taking such abuse lightly, Webster returns the favor in his Mistakes and Corrections in 1837 by attacking Richardson for his ignorance of oriental languages: “Tooke’s principle that a word has one meaning, and one only, and that from this all usages must spring, is substantially correct; but he has, in most cases, failed to find that meaning”; and shifting his attention to Richardson, adds, “and you have rarely or never advanced a step beyond him.” All of that among these three men sounds disturbingly like a case of the blind leading the blind.³⁵

Webster did not include in his quarto the bulk of his “Synopsis” on etymology, but he did nevertheless make a good show of it by including in his prefatory material a forty-five-page section titled “An Introductory Dissertation on the Origin, History, and Connection of the Languages of Western Asia and of Europe”—a treatise he features by broadcasting it in bold letters on his title page. Here, greatly but not sufficiently abbreviated for all but the most erudite philologists, he rehearses indefatigably his intricate “discoveries” about the origin of languages. As with his Dissertations on the English Language, one is amazed at the parade of detail, the fruit of ten years’ labor. His debts in it to both John Horne Tooke and Charles Richardson are abundant, though neither of them went into the subject quite to the extent he did. “Philology is yet in its infancy,” he writes; “I am not at all surprised at the common prejudice existing against etymology.” Not so much in its “infancy,” one might add, to justify his shutting his mind to it except for fleeting allusions here and there. On the other hand, “Should my synopsis ever be published,” he hopes “the learned enquirer might pursue the subject at his leisure.”

FIGURE 2.  In the preface to his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster writes, “Language is an expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.” Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

Webster’s spelling innovations were in some cases more influential and lasting, though still controversial in spite of his continuing efforts to moderate his reforms. Most of those (a small portion) that have become standard in American orthography, such as the removal of redundant letters like e from furore, k from frolick and musick, and u from ardour, endeavour, and terrour, were based on sensible and appealing principles of economy and regularity. Others, like changing the re to er at the end of words such as metre—hence meter, scepter, specter, theater—were the result of Webster’s desire to anglicize them from the French and spell them as they are pronounced; and, on the same principle, the ce in words such as expence, offence, and pretence should be altered to se. He also pronounced that if a verb with two or more syllables ends with a consonant preceded by a vowel, that consonant should not be doubled, as it was (and still is) in England in its derivative forms (past and present participle tenses). So the spelling of travelled and travelling, and worshipped and worshipping, for example, must not continue in the United States. The same goes for nouns from such verbs (e.g., worshipper). He had urged these and other reforms before in his Dissertations on the English Language, in the preface to his Compendious Dictionary, and piecemeal in various essays and letters.³⁶

From the moment Webster’s American Dictionary appeared in American culture, the brilliance of his definitions was generally recognized. Sir James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from the 1870s, described Webster as “a great man, a born definer of words.” George Philip Krapp agreed that in his definitions Webster “reveals a clearness of mind, soundness of judgment and catholicity of interest that puts him intellectually in the same class with Franklin.” Webster himself thought the quality of his definitions were the best part of his book, boasting that he had written up to forty thousand definitions of words that had never before appeared in an English dictionary (see examples below). In spite of his stated determination not to follow Johnson with his definitions, however, he drew many of them directly from the 1799 edition of Johnson’s edition or else raided Johnson’s phrasing for them.³⁷

We can quantify this borrowing, thanks to Joseph Reed, a Johnson scholar who actually counted the number of definitions Webster lifted, one way or another, from Johnson’s dictionary. He pointed out that some 7 percent of Webster’s definitions are verbatim borrowings, 22 percent are altered only by a word or two, and many more are paraphrased. The astonishing total number of these borrowings, Reed calculated, amounted to one-third of all of Webster’s definitions. (It is difficult, incidentally, to credit Webster’s claim that forty thousand of his definitions had never before appeared in a dictionary when one-third of the total was taken from Johnson and many more from other British lexicographers. The claim is more plausible if he had in mind the entire text of his lengthy definitions, as well as definitions for each of his five different categories of entry words.) What this heavy debt to Johnson tells us, among other things, is that Webster, like many lexicographers over the preceding two hundred years, was not immune to leaning heavily on his predecessors while at the same time sharply criticizing them. The main difference here between him and his predecessors was that he vehemently denied any such debt. That was imperative for him to do, of course, because part of his mission was to convince the public he had cast aside Johnson (chiefly), along with other British lexicographers on his solitary journey toward producing an American dictionary.³⁸

Webster also took hundreds of his citations from Johnson, not least those Johnson had taken from his vast and intimate knowledge of English literature, although Webster accused Johnson of featuring many citations for entry words that did not need any illustration because their meaning was obvious. Johnson’s use of thousands of citations, drawn largely from Britain’s great literary heritage, was, as he states in the preface to his Dictionary, a means of defining words by celebrating that tradition and its language: “to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom.” With his citations Webster also wanted to do far more than just illustrate how a word has been used and what it means. In his own preface, he cites Johnson’s famous remark, “The chief glory of a nation arises from its authors,” but he is thinking in larger patriotic, rather than literary, terms of his country’s future greatness as an independent nation. Johnson was a literary man; Webster essentially was not. When Webster argues that the writing of American national leaders and politicians like Washington, John Adams, John Jay, and Jonathan Trumbull Jr. epitomize the literature of a country that “in purity, in elegance, and in technical precision is equalled only by that of the best British authors”—Shakespeare, Milton, John Dryden, and Joseph Addison, for example—his patriotism prevails over his critical sense. His purpose was not to celebrate America’s writers as much as to encourage American literature and society to blossom by endowing American English with added legitimacy, in the process instilling greater confidence and pride in the American vernacular. That kind of nationalism is evident in one of his citations for citizen. One of his senses (or definitions) of the word is: “In a general sense, a native or permanent resident in a city or country; as the citizens of London or Philadelphia; the citizens of the United States.” Another is: “In the U. States, a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of exercising the elective franchise. . . .” Then he moralizes somewhat with this from George Washington: “If the citizens of the United States should not be free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.”

Webster’s citations also served another purpose. He took a high proportion of them from the Bible, again borrowing many of them from Johnson. For the letter S alone, 52 percent of the biblical quotations cited by Johnson were also used by Webster.³⁹ Both were pious men, Johnson a lifelong Anglican and Webster devoted to Calvinist teachings after his conversion in 1808. Webster’s intent was to use biblical citations not only to help define entry words but also to present Christian contexts for the words. Take his citations for abide, for example. One of his senses of the word is “to remain, not cease or fall,” which he illustrates with the verse in Psalms (125:1): “They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever.” Another meaning is “to continue in the same state,” for which he cites from Proverbs (19:23): “The fear of the Lord tendeth to life; and he that hath it shall abide satisfied.” There are quotations for that single word from Genesis, Acts, Jeremiah, 2 Samuel, Joel, and Hosea; lust (verb and noun) is illustrated with excerpts from Exodus, Romans, 2 Peter, James, Psalms, Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Matthew, James, and 1 Corinthians. One is left in no doubt as to how the Bible configures lust. Webster felt that with his definitions he had also made his edition, among other things, a guide to a moral and Christian life, a foundation for Christian leadership, and even a reference work for the King James version of the Bible—a kind of biblical commentary. In later revised editions after his death, the majority of these biblical citations disappeared.

A closer look at a few of Webster’s definitions and their linguistic significance tells us more about how he presented his biographies of words. Education he defines with an explicit moral and social dimension:

EDUCATION, n. [L. educatio.] The bringing up, as of a child; instruction; formation of manners. Education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.

Similarly, he focuses his definition of marriage on the moral and religious:

[M]arriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children.

To purpose he gives a religious and biblical twist, terminating the first sense with an exclamation mark:

PURPOSE, n. [Fr, propos; Sp. It. proposito; L. propositum, propono; pro, before, and pono, to set or place.] 1. That which a person sets before himself as an object to be reached or accomplished; the end or aim to which the view is directed in any plan, measure or exertion. We believe the Supreme Being created intelligent beings for some benevolent and glorious purpose, and if so, how glorious and benevolent must be his purpose in the plan of redemption!

All the definitions are much longer than the one-word phrases in the Compendious, but they vary considerably in length. High, for example, is defined with no fewer than thirty-four senses, hold (verb) with twenty-five, and honor with fourteen. War (noun) has six, but the first is typically long and essaylike, touched, as many definitions are, with reference to Christianity:

FIGURE 3.  Some definitions in Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, such as education, include moral dimensions. Detail: Definition of editor. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

WAR, noun [G., to perplex, embroil, disturb. The primary sense of the root is to strive, struggle, urge, drive, or to turn, to twist.] . . . When war is commenced by attacking a nation in peace, it is called an offensive war and such attack is aggressive. When war is undertaken to repel invasion or the attacks of an enemy, it is called defensive, and a defensive war is considered as justifiable. Very few of the wars that have desolated nations and deluged the earth with blood, have been justifiable. Happy would it be for mankind, if the prevalence of Christian principles might ultimately extinguish the spirit of war and if the ambition to be great, might yield to the ambition of being good. Preparation for war is sometimes the best security for peace.

For woman we are given an admonitory, social, physical, and biblical emphasis:

WOMAN, noun plural women. [a compound of womb and man.] 1. The female of the human race, grown to adult years. And the rib, which the Lord god had taken from the man, made he a woman. Genesis 2: 22. Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible. We see every day women perish with infamy, by having been too willing to set their beauty to show. I have observed among all nations that the women ornament themselves more than the men; that wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings, inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest. 2. a female attendant or servant.

WOMAN, verb intransitive To make pliant.

From this point on, through a succession of revisions, we shall see that Webster’s definitions became shorter and shorter, more compact and with fewer illustrative citations and senses, as editors became increasingly definite about curtailing his discursive, rambling style.

Largely because of his definitions, thousands of which the public read as mini-encyclopedia entries, Webster was triumphant. In spite of all the skeptics and naysayers, working mostly alone except for some help from a handful of Yale faculty and what he grudgingly received from Percival, and after at least ten years of grueling and mostly misconceived etymological work that delayed his completion of the dictionary, the dictionary reminded the American public, including linguists, of what he had claimed by virtue of his spelling books and the 1806 edition: that he was a major authority on the English language in the United States. The distinguished American jurist and legal historian James Kent gushed that Webster had done more for America than “Alfred [the Great] did for England, or Cadmus for Greece.” Not content with that, Kent added that, along with Washington and Jefferson, Webster made up “our trinity of fame.” Schools, universities, state school systems, and legal institutions across the country all chimed in to celebrate Webster’s patriotic achievement. Praise and recognition poured in also from England and France. After 3,000 copies of an edition of the American Dictionary were printed in England in periodical installments between 1830 and 1832—compared, incidentally, to only 2,500 copies in America—in its excitement, the Times of London called it “the most elaborate and successful undertaking of the kind which has ever appeared.”⁴⁰

That said, there was also harsh criticism in England. One of the most damaging attacks came from perhaps the most eminent English comparative philologist of the age, Richard Garnett, who in the Quarterly Review in 1835 could scarcely believe Webster’s “crudities and errors” as he went about tracing the derivations of words: “There is everywhere a great parade of erudition, and a great lack of real knowledge; in short, we do not recollect ever to have witnessed . . . more pains taken to so little purpose.” It was based on research a modern scholar has felicitously described as “a magical mystery tour through the history of language from God and Adam chatting in the Garden of Eden, by way of the earlier Noah and his linguistically significant sons” to England and early America.⁴¹

Webster was now seventy and assumed he could sit back and enjoy his hard-won fame in his New Haven sanctuary among friends and family. But that was not to be. Bad reviews, unexpected competition from within his own family in New Haven, and surprisingly formidable and erudite American competition from a quiet scholar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, soon dimmed the glow of success and reignited his combativeness.