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Noah Webster
1758–1843 · 85 years Tier II
The schoolteacher who spent 26 years rewriting how America spells
The primary school in western Hartford was a single dilapidated room, and Webster, who entered it at six, spent the rest of his life describing its teachers as the dregs of humanity. His father, a farmer and church deacon who had never attended college, mortgaged the farm to send him to Yale. He got there just before his 16th birthday and took his degree in 1778, in years when food shortages and the threat of British invasion pushed classes out into other towns. Law followed, under Oliver Ellsworth, along with a year in which Webster quit his studies and sank into depression. He finished anyway, passed the bar in 1781, and discovered that a country still at war had no work for a new lawyer. He went back to teaching.
The speller came out of a classroom grievance: as many as 70 children of every age in one room, learning from English books written for English children. Webster's answer appeared in 1783 as the first part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, paid him half a cent a copy, and sold 15 million by 1837 and roughly 60 million by 1890. To protect it he rode from one state capital to the next lobbying for copyright statutes that did not yet exist, and decades later went to Washington himself and pushed the Copyright Act of 1831 through the House. The dictionary took the rest of him. He began in 1807 and finished in a Cambridge boarding house in January 1825, with 70,000 words in it and 12,000 that had never appeared in a dictionary before.
In 1791 he helped found the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1832 he published a History of the United States that left slavery out of the American story altogether, spoke of whiteness as the supreme race, and declared Anglo-Saxons the only true Americans. Five years later his daughter Eliza came out for abolition and he wrote to tell her that slavery was a great sin but not a northern sin, that preachers who came north to agitate about it were highly criminal, and that they deserved the penitentiary. The money ran the same direction as the politics. His 1828 dictionary sold 2,500 copies. He mortgaged his house to pay for a second edition and carried debt for the rest of his life.
He died in New Haven on May 28, 1843, a few days after finishing revisions to that second edition, and George and Charles Merriam bought the rights from his estate the same year. Every Merriam-Webster on a desk descends from that transaction, and so, more loosely, does every dictionary that has borrowed the name since. The spellings held: center, color, defense, traveler. Tung, his attempt at tongue, did not. Emily Dickinson grew up on the book and called the lexicon her only companion for years, and one of her biographers wrote that she read it the way a priest reads a breviary. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.
Lifespan
Noah Webster's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I
book
The Blue-Backed Speller, retitled twice and never out of print in his lifetime 1783 -
Sketches of American Policy
book
An early argument for a strong central government, built on Rousseau 1785 -
An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution
book
Published as A Citizen of America and read well outside New York 1787 -
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language
book
The first try, and the reason he attempted the second 1806 -
An American Dictionary of the English Language
book
70,000 entries, 12,000 of them new to any dictionary 1828 -
Copyright Act of 1831
law
He addressed the House himself to get it moving 1831
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1774 aged ~16 Enters Yale on a farm his father mortgaged He was not yet 16. Wartime shortages scattered classes into other towns.
- 1781 aged ~23 Passes the bar and cannot find a client He had already abandoned the law once, during a year of depression.
- 1783 aged ~25 Publishes the speller that will sell 60 million copies
- October 26, 1789 aged 31 Marries Rebecca Greenleaf at New Haven They had eight children.
- 1791 aged ~33 Helps found the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery
- December 1793 aged 35 Founds New York's first daily newspaper on a loan from Hamilton Hamilton lent him 1,500 dollars to come edit for the Federalists. The paper was the American Minerva.
- January 1825 aged 66 Finishes the dictionary in a boarding house in Cambridge, England Eighteen years after he started it.
- April 14, 1828 aged 69 Registers the copyright on An American Dictionary of the English Language He was 70. It sold 2,500 copies.
- May 28, 1843 aged 84 Dies at New Haven days after finishing the second edition The Merriams bought the rights from his estate that year.
