Remembering Noah Webster, a champion of American English

One of the great, but often overlooked, Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries achieved a milestone on this date in 1828. That’s when Noah Webster copyrighted An American Dictionary of the English Language. It contained 70,000 entries and "was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well," according to merriam-webster.com.

While working on his magnum opus, the Connecticut native and Yale graduate "learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, in order to research the origins of his own country's tongue," the site reports. "One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder."

Despite his singular claim to fame, Webster was not a man of limited accomplishments.

As the Los Angeles Times noted in its review of The Forgotten Founding Father, Joshua Kendall’s 2011 biography of Webster, “he was variously a lawyer, patriot, amateur epidemiologist, statistician, pamphleteer, co-founder of Amherst College and, at Washington's urging, editor of New York City's first daily newspaper, the American Minerva. As Washington's confidant at the Constitutional Convention, he had a voice in the proceedings, including his strong advocacy of several key principles, the need for ‘a supreme power at the head of the union most notable among them. But his most enduring triumph was his relentless mission to get Americans to think of themselves as Americans.”

Nor was this self-important man a milquetoast. 

The Wall Street Journal, in its review of Kendall’s biography, notes that Webster "was not well-liked by the nation's great men, as Mr. Kendall shows. He was pompous: Jeremy Belknap, the contemporary historian, nicknamed him 'the Monarch.' Benjamin Rush enjoyed telling the story of how Webster, upon being welcomed to Philadelphia, replied: 'Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia upon the occasion!'"

Webster believed that the spelling of many words was artificial and needlessly confusing, so he proposed revisions, such as changing musick to music and plough to plow. While Webster won some battles on that front, as those two cases show, he lost others. Here are examples, from merriam-webster.com, of his successful and unsuccessful spelling revisions. (I think we definitely made the right call in turning thumbs down on "wimmen.")

Webster successfully changed:

gaol  to  jail
mould  to  mold
travelled  to  traveled
honour  to  honor
centre  to  center
humour  to  humor
masque  to  mask
publick  to  public

Webster failed to change:

ache  to  ake
soup  to  soop
sleigh  to  sley
sponge  to  spunge
tongue  to  tung
cloak  to  cloke
determine  to  determin
women  to  wimmen