APPENDIX A

The “Webster” Brand

The brand name “Webster” involved another dictionary conflict that was fought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the Merriam copyright expired in 1889, G. & C. Merriam was forced by the publication of a number of non-Merriam “Webster” dictionaries to pursue lawsuits in order to prevent any other company from using the name in the title of a dictionary. By 1909, the company had lost a string of these lawsuits, and the name was judged to be in the public domain, a genericized trademark for any American English dictionary. A judge that year ruled on what had become an ongoing, complicated, legal battleground: the Merriam company “is in no position to deny a purely descriptive use of the word to any other dictionary which is as legitimate as its own. The constant iteration that all such are ‘bogus’ or not ‘genuine’ is merely a childish extravagance.” The one qualification was that a non-Merriam dictionary had to carry a disclaimer: “This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of Webster’s dictionary or their successors.”¹

One of the first non-Merriam dictionaries to be well known as “Webster’s” was Webster’s Universal Dictionary, published by the World Syndicate Publishing Company in 1937. After that, such titles multiplied. Webster’s New Universal, for example, is a new version of the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966), which is unrelated to the Merriam editions or to the literary content of dictionaries in the Websterian line of descent. To name a few others: the World Publishing Company’s Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1951) and its college-size Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1953), Simon and Schuster’s Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (1979), and Microsoft’s Encarta Webster’s Dictionary, formerly called the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999; 2nd edition, 2004).

A later legal battle was fought in 1991, when Random House added Webster to the title of its college dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Inc. interpreted this as an aggressive move on its lucrative Webster-brand college dictionaries and took Random House to court. Merriam-Webster won, but in September 1994, the verdict was overturned on appeal. This put the issue beyond any doubt. The name “Webster” legally does not now necessarily have a connection with either Merriam or Noah Webster himself. Indeed, as David Micklethwait explains, “there are now so many non-Merriam Webster dictionaries on the market in America that it can no longer be said that, without a disclaimer, people will assume any Webster dictionary to be a Merriam.” Because of that reality of American dictionary publishing, the Merriam company now publishes its “Webster” dictionaries with its own disclaimer:

The name Webster is no guarantee of excellence. It is used by a number of publishers and may serve mainly to mislead an unwary buyer.

Merriam-Webster™ is the name you should look for when you consider the purchase of dictionaries or other fine reference books. It carries the reputation of a company that has been publishing since 1831 and is your assurance of quality and authority.²

In Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition (1957), incidentally, the World Publishing Company makes a point of saying its dictionary has nothing at all to do with Noah Webster, Merriam, or any edition deriving from Merriam dictionaries. In spite of paying oblique lip service to Webster—because that always has been where the commercial leverage is—as having laid the foundations of American lexicography, it instead credits Worcester’s Comprehensive, Pronouncing, and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language of 1830 with having laid down the “broad foundations for American dictionaries” with “new words, a more conservative spelling, brief, well-phrased definitions, full indication of pronunciation by means of diacritics, use of stress marks to divide syllables, and lists of synonyms.” Webster’s 1828 dictionary, it continues, “was not, as is often claimed, the real parent of the modern American dictionary; it was merely the foster-parent. . . . The first American lexicographer to hit upon the particular pattern that distinguished the American dictionary was Webster’s lifelong rival, Joseph E. Worcester. . . . Because it was compact and low-priced, it immediately became popular—far more popular, in fact, than any of Webster’s own dictionaries in his own lifetime [my italics]”—that is, before the Merriams came on to the scene.³

That point about popularity is an oversight if one regards the Goodrich octavo as one of Webster’s dictionaries. Nonetheless, the historical point is well taken. It’s not just a matter of whether a dictionary bearing the name “Webster” relates to the Merriam company, but whether (or how much) it, or any Merriam company dictionary from the 1850s onward, relates textually to Webster himself.

In any case, thanks to Chauncey Allen Goodrich, George and Charles Merriam, Noah Porter, and the Merriam editors who followed, the prestigious label “Webster” remains iconic in America. It sells dictionaries because the distinguished publishing quality historically attached to the name—its American origin, ingenuity, and even moral or Christian basis, and its long identification as the alleged “standard” in America—gives people confidence that by buying a book with that name in the title they are on reliable ground.