The Dictionary That Made Americans American

Noah Webster died in eighteen forty-three, before he could finish the second edition of the great dictionary that had consumed the last thirty years of his life. He had already published the first edition, in eighteen twenty-eight, after learning, by most accounts, twenty-six languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, so he could trace English words to their deepest roots. That edition, in two volumes, contained roughly twelve thousand new words and many thousands of new definitions that had never appeared in any English dictionary before.

Two brothers from Springfield, George and Charles Merriam, had been watching. They were printers and booksellers operating out of this city, and they recognized that Webster's dictionary was both a masterwork and a commercial problem, the two-volume set cost between fifteen and twenty dollars, beyond the reach of most American families. After Webster's death, the Merriams acquired the rights from his estate.

They cut it down, brought the price to six dollars, and in eighteen forty-seven published the first Merriam-Webster dictionary from their shop in Springfield. Massachusetts promptly ordered a copy for every school in the state. Other states followed.

The dictionary became standard, the one Americans used to settle arguments about spelling and meaning, the one teachers kept on their desks, the one that decided, year by year, what American English actually was. The Merriam-Webster offices remain in Springfield today. Every word added to their dictionary in the past century and a half has been added here, in the same city where the Merriam brothers decided that a dictionary the whole country could afford was worth building.

The American language has a hometown, and this is it.