How old is webster dictionary

Webster's mother's name was Mercy. He hailed from an "established Yankee family. Webster went to Yale at the age of He graduated in With no solid career plans afterward, he did what all unemployed post grads do: He wrote that a liberal education "disqualifies a man for business.

This book was widely known as the Blue-Backed Speller, for its blue cover. He lived during the American Revolution and sought American independence, in part by Americanizing and standardizing the spellings of various words defying Anglocreep —choosing s over c in words like defense, switching the re to er in words like center and theater, changing musick to music , dropping the double l in traveler and the u in words like colour or favour.

He wanted to change tongue to tung, and women to wimmen, but that didn't happen. For example, " 1. The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend.

Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. Parodic-sounding run-on definitions like hotel and oxygen have given way to simpler prose. Generally, that is. Door , hotel , and oxygen await revision. In content and tone, the Third was less stiff and self-important than the Second , but it was still stiff and self-important. The capital-D dictionary was a serious work for serious people who displayed it prominently in their living rooms.

Other lexicographers, though, think this more laid-back version of traditional defining is still too stodgy. Accompanied by historical notes, the meatier definitions feel less like brief explanations than discrete biographies. There used to be a couple of lines of explanatory matter—an etymology, the occasional note on usage. Now that material is written, and in complete sentences.

These notes can be blindingly scholarly, filled with odd symbols and diacritical marks, like the entry for the combining form blephar- :. They can also be playful, like the entry for bippy :. Or the one for asshat :. The Fourth would not radically depart from the Third the way the Third had departed from the Second , he said. The Fourth would add 50, new terms, from bodice ripper to minivan to sabermetrics , bringing the total to half a million and growing the book by pages.

Without it we will quickly be just another dictionary publisher and before long, not even the biggest one. The action, however, was in the lucrative market for smaller, cheaper college dictionaries. At the time Llewellyn wrote his memo, Merriam was moving more than a million copies a year of the ninth edition of the Collegiate , which was published in By the fall of , it had been on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks and counting.

But competition was mounting. After Merriam published the 10 th edition of the Collegiate in , rivals sniped at the exclusion of words like cyberpunk and mountain bike. Merriam countered that it alone offered radwaste and ranch dressing. In this aggressively competitive marketplace, Merriam doubled down on front-list titles that would sell. Updating the Collegiate required returning to the citation files and re-examining and often revising every element of all ,plus entries, a project that engaged the entire staff and necessitated about 1 million editorial decisions.

The company produced bilingual dictionaries. Plans for the Fourth were tabled again and again. Work began on a style manual, with rules governing parts of speech, order of entry, variant spellings, run-ons, boldface colons, cross references, inflected forms, functional labels, pronunciation, etymology, dating, usage labels, usage notes, illustrative quotations, and more. But other projects intervened and the manual was never finished. During my visit to Springfield, I tell Morse that Gove must have assumed the Third would be updated in 30 or 40 years, if not sooner.

Like many Merriam employees, the year-old Morse is a company lifer. His academic work had nothing to do with lexicography. Few Merriam staffers arrive having dreamed of a career defining words.

Morse wrote definitions for the Collegiate , directed publication of a geographical dictionary, and helped convert the Third to a digital format.

When he was named president and publisher in , he became only the second lexicographer since Noah Webster to hold the top business job. The assumption inside Merriam at the time was that the company would publish another fat unabridged dictionary, maybe with a CD-ROM stuck in a flap on the inside of the front cover. In , Merriam published one more addendum to the Third with entries— propeller head, tree hugger , golden handcuffs —already prepared for the new Collegiate edition the following year.

But Morse decided that that would be it for printing-press revisions to the Third. The future of the Unabridged would be digital. Morse scrapped the next all-consuming Collegiate update. Web advertising, subscriptions, and the backlist were paying the bills. In early , Morse told the editorial staff that the company was embarking on a full update of the Third. It would happen on the website only. It would be called the Unabridged. There was disbelief, relief, thrill.

It was a signpost on the horizon. They estimated that, as of , the English lexicon included more than 1 million unique words, and compared that corpus with the words in the Unabridged and the American Heritage Dictionary.

One obvious takeaway is that the breadth of the English language is greater than any dictionary. Another is that data can help lexicographers do their jobs better. These findings raise some existential questions for dictionary-makers. Do we really need an Unabridged or OED to tell us whether a word is a word? Absent the old space constraints, why should Merriam or anyone else get to pin a ribbon on a word and welcome it to the club?

What a lexicographer does, then, is decide whether a word has become established in the language, determine how its use has evolved, and explain that to readers. The printed material is stacked on shelves in a back corner of the second floor, and typists enter the cits into the electronic files.

Given the hit or miss nature of reading and marking, their judgments were remarkably good but far more speculative than ones being made today. The slow accumulation of cits created a culture of deliberateness. That was considered fast. Now, as the Culturomics researchers posited, the proliferation of electronic databases and antsy online audiences are encouraging lexicographers to move faster still.

Perrault estimates that about 90 percent of the words in the New Words spreadsheet will eventually make the Unabridged. Scanning the list I notice upfake , a basketball term for a player feigning a shooting motion. Googling yields a few hits for instructional drills and videos. The challenge for Merriam is finding the sweet spot between Noah Webster and the Internet, between a strict single standard and a lexicographic free-for-all.

That latter category might include Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary , which are examples of crowdsourced lexicography, or ordinary people defining words themselves.

Traditional dictionary-makers have jumped into this sandbox because the public expects it and because it can be lexicographically fruitful. The British publisher Collins is entering reader-suggested words into its online dictionaries. Nevertheless, in an age when traditional lexicography might feel like a dying art, democratization is still provoking some anxiety.

Probably both. So McKean posted a comment and a link , noting its existence in print in English. Time will tell whether, after months or perhaps years of research and assessment, Merriam decides it rises to the level of a dictionary word. Zimmer, another former Oxford editor who runs two nontraditional word sites, Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary. Without their Sgt. But he was prescient about how technology would change the business of lexicography.

Plans for magnetic discs soon gave way to visions of the Internet as Merriam and other dictionary publishers tried to decipher the digital world. In , Merriam looked into securing the URL dictionary. It then faced a decision that would help determine its future: Should it license the Collegiate to the company with the killer Web address or go it alone?

Houghton Mifflin and Random House licensed to Dictionary. Merriam decided to follow a different model. While it licensed the Collegiate to America Online in , it also chose to make its cash cow available on the Internet, for free. It turned out that people did use the dictionary, and used it obsessively. In addition to its award-winning Merriam-Webster.

Merriam-Webster can be considered the direct lexicographical heir of Noah Webster. In , the company bought the rights to the edition of Webster's magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged.

At the same time, they secured the rights to create revised editions of the work. Since that time, Merriam-Webster editors have carried forward Noah Webster's work, creating some of the most widely used and respected dictionaries and reference books in the world. In , brothers George and Charles Merriam opened a printing and bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts which they named G. Merriam Co. The company, which was renamed Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, in , has been in continuous operation since that time.

The first Merriam-Webster dictionary was issued on September 24, Polk and General Zachary Taylor. The Merriam-Webster.