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The death knell came in litigation that involved not copyright or trademark law but “trade dress”: the likelihood of confusion caused by similarly named products (the words Webster’s plus College) with a similar appearance. In a 1994 federal trial,…

Nineteen years after George W. Ogilvie’s death, and after nearly a decade of further litigation with Merriam, Ogilvie’s successor-in-interest, World Publishing, issued a four-page pamphlet that amounted to a victory lap: Merriam was enjoined against…

Throughout the mid-20th century, Merriam’s public-relations campaign urged people to think of Merriam’s dictionaries as the only ones legitimately called Webster. Among the intelligentsia, it was largely successful. Yet it wasn’t quite correct to say…

George W. Ogilvie asserted that in all the litigation over Webster dictionaries, Merriam had been “whipped, unqualifiedly and absolutely.” The trend continued when a case came before Judge Learned Hand in 1917. By now, Ogilvie had issued Webster…

In 1914, Ogilvie pushed for federal legislation to allow anyone to publish Webster dictionaries with impunity. The corrupt Chair of the House Committee on Patents, William A. Oldfield, had the decisive vote. He suggested that either Merriam or…

In 1909, a federal court gave Merriam a victory by declaring that any “Webster’s dictionary” issued by Ogilvie or his successors must contain the following disclaimer on its title page: “This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of…

For the first time, Ogilvie issued a Webster dictionary listing himself as publisher and showing copyright notices (1904, 1905, and 1907) in his name. Meanwhile, in advertisements, he shouted that only his book was authentically derived from the pen…