Noah Webster and the American Language

Before there was a Merriam-Webster dictionary, there was simply Noah Webster, sitting at a desk in New Haven, defining the language of a country that had not yet decided how to spell its own words. Webster was born on October sixteenth, seventeen fifty-eight, in what was then the West Division of Hartford, the town now called West Hartford, in a farmhouse that still stands as a museum on South Main Street. He graduated from Yale in seventeen seventy-eight and spent the early years of his career teaching school in Glastonbury, Hartford, and West Hartford.

In seventeen eighty-three, he published the first volume of what he called A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The world remembered it as the Blue-Backed Speller, for its cover. In the decades after Webster's death, it went on to sell sixty million copies.

For most American children in the early republic, it was the first book they ever read. The speller was part of a deliberate project: Webster believed that the new nation needed a distinct language, not just a dialect of English. American English should have its own spellings, its own vocabulary, its own identity.

He standardized 'color' over 'colour,' 'music' over 'musick,' and hundreds of other variations that still distinguish American from British usage. In eighteen twenty-eight, at the age of seventy, Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language, seventy thousand words, the product of twenty-seven years of work. George and Charles Merriam acquired the rights after his death in eighteen forty-three.

Every Merriam-Webster dictionary published since traces its lineage directly to the man who grew up on a West Hartford farm and decided that America deserved its own words.