Linguistic Independence & Its Sequelae
Sometimes treated as a “Founding Father” for his contributions to the American language, Noah Webster was eager to liberate Americans from their bondage to Samuel Johnson.
At first, when creating a simple spelling book (1783), he revered Johnson; soon he understood Johnson to be a competitor with faults, not a sage to be followed; and by the time he began compiling his first little dictionary (1806), he was reviling Johnson. There were others, as you’ll see, working at the same time as Webster chafed within Johnson’s long shadow.
SUI GENERIS
Alonzo Chappel. Engraving of Noah Webster, 1867. With a clipped signature of Noah Webster over a characteristic paraph.
Noah Webster had a strange mix of qualities: superb definer but delusional etymologist, untiring worker but disastrous businessman. He would spend a decade composing useless word histories in the egregiously misguided belief that thousands of English words derived from the Ethiopian and Chaldean languages, and then his poor judgment guaranteed that he’d lose money on the result.
Webster desperately wanted to be influential, but most of his early efforts were relatively ineffectual.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 53
PHILOLOGICAL PHILATELY
Sheet of 4¢ U.S. postage stamps featuring Noah Webster, together with a distinctive Webster envelope canceled by the post office in his hometown of West Hartford, CT.
On October 16, 1958, the U.S. Post Office Department issued 4¢ stamps in honor of Noah Webster. Webster was lionized posthumously through a long-standing campaign by Merriam. Webster ultimately became synonymous with “American dictionary”—to such a degree that it became impossible to maintain a trademark with his name. All the while, even during Webster’s lifetime, other publishers were issuing Webster dictionaries. But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves . . .
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 62
A “ROYAL” DICTIONARY FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC
William Perry. The Royal Standard English Dictionary. Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1788. 1st American ed.
(Same.) Brookfield, MA: E. Merriam & Co., 1804.
Although Webster is known as the Father of the American Dictionary, his wasn’t the first dictionary printed in North America. That was The Royal Standard English Dictionary, originating in Scotland but reissued in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1788. Twelve years after America had renounced royalty, this Royal dictionary was incongruously dedicated to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Printer Isaiah Thomas produced five editions by 1800. Other American editions were soon being printed by Ebenezer Merriam, aided by two apprentices, his nephews George and Charles. That marked the inception of the Merriam family’s dictionary-publishing empire.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 46
NOT YOUR FATHER’S JOHNSON
John Elliott and Samuel Johnson, Jr. A selected, pronouncing and accented Dictionary. Suffield, CT: Edward Gray for Oliver D. & I. Cook, 1800. 2d ed.
The first homegrown American lexicographer? That honor belongs to Samuel Johnson Jr. (no relation to the famous Samuel Johnson), who first issued this dictionary in 1798. Originality was not among Johnson’s virtues, and most of his definitions are plagiarized.
This second edition was revised by a Protestant preacher John Elliott, who more than doubled the number of words covered in Johnson Jr.’s work. Elliott also infused the work with tendentiously anti-Catholic definitions. A mild example: “Popery . . . the Romish religion.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 54
CAN YOU SPELL?
Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book. Providence: John Carter, 1789. 12th ed.
As a young man Webster wrote a three-part Grammatical Institute consisting of a speller (1783), a grammar (1784), and a reader (1785).
At first Webster stuck to traditional British spellings such as favour, honour, and neighbour, along with manœvre and sceptre. Benjamin Franklin later goaded him toward radical respellings (az, haz, tru, valu), but the American people scorned these.
By the 19th century, when favor and honor had gained favor and honor, this book evolved into the best-selling “blueback speller.” This is the only known complete copy of this 1789 imprint of Webster’s American Spelling Book.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 53
ANOTHER CAREER CHANGE
Noah Webster. A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. New Haven: Sidney’s Press, 1806.
Unsuccessful at law, schoolmastering, and journalism, Webster turned (naturally) to lexicography. His first dictionary, based on John Entick’s, is small: by compendious Webster meant “short, brief, concise, summary.” The type is small, the two-column layout dense. Almost every one of the 40,000 definitions appears on a single line of type. Webster now championed noticeably American spellings, such as defense and favor. In his preface, he promised a much more ambitious work. That would take another 22 years.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 57
DUAL PATERNITIES
William Thornton. Copyright Certificate for Webster’s Compendious Dictionary, issued by the U.S. Patent Office, 1806.
Noah Webster is known not only as the Father of the American Dictionary but also as the Father of American Copyright Law. Few campaigned more tirelessly for authors’ right to profit from their intellectual labor. This historic certificate was signed by William Thornton, Superintendent of the Patent Office and Architect of the Capitol. It is Webster’s own file copy—from an archive acquired by the Garner Collection in 2021. In this document, Webster’s two figurative paternities (dictionaries and copyright) unite.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 58
IT GIVES US PLEASURE
Review of Noah Webster’s Compendious Dictionary. The Panoplist, May 1806, pp. 550–54.
Two months after Webster received his copyright certificate, The Panoplist—a religious magazine—reviewed the Compendious Dictionary. The reviewer was relieved that Webster abandoned “the radical change of the orthography” he had once proposed. Strictures are issued about grammatical errors in the preface, and then there’s this: “In the definitions we perceive a few inaccuracies. . . . Incapability, ‘a legal qualification.’ . . . The error is probably typographical. The word, we suppose, was meant to be disqualification.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 58
CULTISH PHILOLOGY
John Horne Tooke. Ἐπεα πτεροεντα; or, The Diversions of Purley. 2 vols. London: For the author, 1798, 1805. 2d ed.
Few philological books have had more influence on lexicography than Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley—and none have had a worse influence.
At the heart of his book, with two volumes published almost two decades apart, is a fundamentally misguided theory of language development. Tooke held that (1) every word has one and only one meaning; (2) a word’s meaning is determined by the meaning of its etymon, or origin; and (3) a word’s etymon can be found in virtually any of the world’s languages on the basis of superficial similarities.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 55
NOT GUILTY!
Two 1794 conder tokens commemorating John Horne Tooke’s acquittal on charges of treason.
Conder tokens were 18th-century privately minted coins produced to make political statements, to honor citizens, to commemorate events, and to promote businesses. These two were made to celebrate Horne Tooke’s victory in a trial for high treason. The prosecutor was John Scott, the future lord chancellor known as Lord Eldon. With the help of defense lawyer Thomas Erskine (celebrated on the reverse of the token displayed at right), Tooke was acquitted of all charges. Tooke then returned to his etymological excogitations.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 55
A THIRD WORDBOOK BURNED
E. Bocquet, engraver. John Horne Tooke, Esq. From a bust owned by Sir Francis Burdett. Framed with a signed 14-shilling receipt issued in 1803 to Mr. Budd for vol. III of The Diversions of Purley—a volume that went up in flames.
The receipt was issued perhaps for Henry Budd, an alumnus of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who served as chaplain of Bridewell Hospital, London. Though Tooke would live another nine years, he would never publish this projected third volume—which, had it been completed, might have stultified knowledge even more than the first two did. Just before his death, Tooke threw the manuscript for volume three into the fire, doubtless without returning the money of paid subscribers like Budd.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 55
NO CRABBED DISTINCTIONS HERE
George Crabb. English Synonymes Explained, in Alphabetical Order. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1816.
George Crabb was a barrister and failed clergyman who became a legal scholar, historian, and lexicographer. Of synonymy, he wrote: “not a single writer . . . has treated it in a scientific manner adequate to its importance.” He was nothing if not systematic. His essays take small groups of synonyms and, in a paragraph or two, explain etymologies, elucidate shades of meaning, and differentiate one word from the next by sense, idiom, and suitability in a given context.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 60
PROVOKING WEBSTER
John Pickering. A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States of America. Boston: Cummings & Hilliard, 1816.
Pickering—the son of the notoriously unsuccessful U.S. Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering—became a lawyer and spent the rest of his life declining prestigious academic posts to pursue philology. This Vocabulary marked the first attempt to collect Americanisms. Noah Webster felt provoked: America wasn’t big enough for two linguistic authorities. Hence Webster issued a mean-spirited diatribe attacking Pickering on every conceivable point. Where Pickering found neologisms, Webster saw none: he denied that Americans had coined as many as ten new words.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 61
“SPECIMEN OF MY PROPOSED DICTIONARY”
Noah Webster. Letter to Samuel M. Hopkins of New York, discussing a specimen sheet of his proposed dictionary. June 1809.
ALS.
As soon as Webster finished the Compendious, he turned his thoughts to a successor. By 1809 he had had specimen entries typeset in the hope of enlisting subscribers to his unabridged dictionary. Yet no such specimen sheet has ever been recorded—only this letter.
As you’ll see here, Webster was already engaged in the fruitless search for Ethiopian cognates of English words. As one biographer puts it, “the search for truth would lead this brilliant polymath to build an alternative universe entirely out of gibberish.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 58
“BRAG” IS NOT FROM ARABIC
Manuscript leaf from Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary, with entries from bracteate through braid.
On this page are draft entries in Webster’s hand for:
bracteate, adj. Furnished with bractes (leaves or scales).
bracted, adj. Same.
brad, n. (a type of nail)
bradypus (a sloth)
brag, v.i. (to boast)
braggadocio (a boastful person)
Before publication, he would cut the etymology tying the verb brag to Arabic and to the Saxon word meaning “brain.” But the published version retained the false ties of the noun brad to Armoric and Chaldee. Webster’s attributions to Moxon, Milton, Bacon, and Dryden derive from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 62
DEEPLY FLAWED MAGNUM OPUS
Noah Webster. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. New York: Sherman Converse, 1828. Lyman Cobb’s marked copy.
The American Dictionary marks a milestone, but it was deeply flawed. Although Webster’s definitions were superb, his etymologies were outlandish: he absurdly traced English words to Arabic, Chaldee, Ethiopic, and Persian. Worse, his entries were replete with sermonizing digressions.
Even with a modest print run of 2,500 copies, the dictionary failed to sell out over the next 13 years. The $20 price was too high.
Lyman Cobb owned this copy; in the margins he scolds Webster for inconsistencies in spelling—which he would soon parade before the public.
Ex coll. David Micklethwait. HHD no. 62
A DISPUTATIOUS LETTER
Noah Webster’s retained copy of his autograph letter to his publisher, Sherman Converse, 20 January 1828.
ALS.
Webster struggled to find a publisher for his magnum opus. But finally Sherman Converse agreed, and he sent to Leipzig for the Asian typefaces to print Webster’s etymologies. By February 1826, he had prepared sample pages to promote the book.
Yet a rupture soon occurred. In this blistering letter, Webster said Converse had no right to produce a British edition or an abridgment. Ultimately Webster relented on the latter, but when he saw the result, he was enraged by what had been changed. (See Lexical Warfare.)
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 65
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Peter Mark Roget. Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. London: Longman, Brown et al., 1852.
As a young physician, Roget dreamed of creating a “thesaurus”—Greek for “treasury.” After retiring, he divided the English language into a thousand categories, gathered into five groups: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, and Affections. An instant success, the book went through 25 printings during Roget’s lifetime. This second edition is inscribed by Roget to his son, John Lewis Roget, who produced editions from 1879 into the 20th century; it bears the bookplate of his grandson Samuel Romilly Roget, who became editor in 1908.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 76