by David Wolman
At first, Webster disagreed with the senior statesman’s ideas for changing the written word. As historian Jill Lepore explains: “Webster had mocked all proposals ‘to alter the spelling of words, by expunging the superfluous letters.’ He had wanted to standardize and Americanize spelling to get everyone speaking the same way, but he didn’t think it wise to simplify the spelling code. Writing favour f-a-v-o-r seemed to him ridiculous.” Although the language was full of spelling–pronunciation discord, Webster felt that trying to fix it would result in time wasted at best, and wholesale unintelligibility at worst.12
Yet as word meanings and pronunciations can change over time, so too did Webster’s attitude about spelling reform. Perhaps, charmed by the renowned inventor-scholar-statesman and one-time printer, Webster was won over by Franklin’s ideas and came to believe that major orthographic reform of some kind was “still practicable.”13 He began composing essays on the topic and sketching an orthography makeover of his own. “Strange as it may seem,” he wrote in the preface to his first, much smaller dictionary in 1806, “the fact is undeniable that the present doctrin that no change must be made in writing words, is destroying the benefits of an alphabet, and reducing our language to the barbarism of Chinese characters instead of letters.”14
Webster was in line with Franklin philosophically, but his prescription for the language was less radical, at least in terms of its visual impact: no new letters. What Webster did want, or believed necessary, was a streamlining and letter-swapping campaign across the lexicon. Letters like the e on the end of words such as innovative, alternative, doctrine, and definite had to go. So did the a in bread, the u in armour, the second l in traveller, and other “superfluous or silent letters.” Webster also tried to remake words so that they contained more obvious signposts to pronunciation, which to his ear called for changing grieve to greev, tongue to tung, women to wimmen, is to iz, sleigh to sley, and speak to speek. And that was only the warm-up. Thum, hed, bilt, fether, tuf, dawter—Webster’s ax(e) kept cutting.
Yet his suggested reforms gained little traction beyond Benjamin Franklin’s reading room. Meanwhile, the Speller’s popularity hardly matched young Webster’s vision of his own lofty destiny. Teaching hadn’t gone well, his attempt at a magazine-writing career hadn’t panned out, and, although he was eventually admitted to the Connecticut bar, law wasn’t putting wind in his sails or coinage in his pockets. If only he could make his views on spelling stick, history might remember him as the father of the American language.
What he overlooked, said Morse, is that “language can only be a unifying force if it’s inclusive.” Systematic change to orthography, no matter how reasonable, inevitably resembles commandments from on high. Americans may have already been culturally distinct from the British, but they shared the laissez-faire linguistic temperament that previously doomed efforts to form a language academy in London, and spelling reforms before that.15 If anything, post–Revolutionary War Americans would have been even more resistant to an idea that smacked of the few telling the many how to behave.
Frustrated that an American tongue wasn’t taking off, and possibly irritated by the lack of respect he felt he deserved from his Ivy League peers, Webster wrote the following in his journal on his thirtieth birthday: “30 years of my life gone! I have read much, written much, tried to do much good, but with little advantage to myself. I will now leave writing.”16 He had already written a bestseller used in classrooms throughout the country, and his Sketches of American Policy, published a few years before that thirtieth birthday, outlined a number of ideas about government that had worked their way into the Constitutional Convention and even into the Constitution. Yet Webster felt like a failure.
What he couldn’t see was that he was accumulating the knowledge and experiences that he would later draw upon, first for the smaller A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), and then, much more so, for An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). One such influence was his keen interest in the sciences. Illness was a less quarantined aspect to daily life back then, even though little was known about underlying biology. Webster read heavily on the subject, and later published two volumes on infectious disease. It’s the kind of side interest illustrative of his information-devouring mind, and of his detective’s instinct for getting to the bottom of things.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson narrowly won the presidency and Federalists and Republicans clashed over how centralized the power of the nation should be. Many people, including Webster, thought the nation was on the brink of civil war, and the precarious state of the union renewed his conviction that a common language would be—must be—the nation’s essential bonding agent.
Yet his belief in a national language wasn’t purely altruistic in the “All men are created equal” sense of the word. In A Is for America, Lepore describes Webster as one in a series of white, upper-class, early Americans driven not by a noble duty to make English and education more accessible to the masses, but rather “to reform the language of those who already spoke it.”17 As many as 25 percent of the population of the US in 1790 didn’t speak English as a first language. These people are conspicuously absent from Webster’s writings about how to improve communication. His goal, it seems, was to eliminate pronunciation variation among American English speakers by making spelling more sensible. But what about the slaves, Native Americans, and immigrants who didn’t speak English? Webster’s reply might have been: “I’m sorry, who?”
Less honorable still, says Lepore, was the quest to circumvent language barriers through alphabet and/or language reform in the service of missionary practices that weren’t exactly culturally sensitive. “You have to pay attention to who these reformers were,” Lepore explained to me. “There are power issues historically, as far as how English was used to wipe out other languages. Suppression of sign language in the nineteenth century, for example—that’s a harrowing story. What happened to indigenous languages—there’s a very dark story there too.” Webster, she said, is part of that legacy.
En route to West Hartford, I asked Morse about this issue because Lepore’s point had unsettled my sense of Webster as a champion of the cause of the poor speller, nudging him closer to something along the lines of a bigoted crank. Morse’s judgment is less condemning. “When you take modern sensibilities and apply them to those people back then, they’re all schmucks and we shouldn’t pay attention to them. To me, you want to try and get into their heads and imagine what they were attempting to do.” In that sense, Webster wasn’t out to persecute; he wanted, perhaps naïvely so, to revolutionize the language and save the Union, and he wasn’t going to let the details of diversity stand in the way.
Webster joined the New York Philological Society, which was founded in 1788, for the “purpose of ascertaining and improving the American Tongue.”18 Yet by the turn of the millennium, he must have begun doubting whether hard-core spelling reform was a viable strategy for said ascertaining and improving. Instead of pushing an apparently unpopular idea, Webster shifted to a new tactic for defining this new language and its people, or at least the white English-speaking ones.
The Declaration of Independence was only a few decades old, but for more than a century, New World settlers had been developing vocabulary distinct from British English. This trend was in part a necessity; a panoply of new words for landscape features (ponds and bluffs19), animals (skunks and rattlesnakes), scientific principles (nutrients and vaccines), ideas of government (caucuses and congressmen), and foods (chowder and succotash) were sprouting up in and around the colonies. In addition, Native American words were being absorbed into the lexicon, words like squash, terrapin, moose, moccasin, tomahawk, and opossum, as were a continuous stream of new foreign words: coleslaw and waffle (Dutch), bayou and butte (French), chocolate and tornado (Spanish).20 Webster heard this lexicographic expansion as evidence of an emerging language, and the need to inventory it in the pages of a dictionary.
Exactly when he
anointed himself lexicographer of the land no one knows, but by 1800 Webster was soliciting advance orders for a “Dictionary of the American Language.”21 The idea was not well received. Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, by then forty-five years old and in its fifth edition, was still the gold standard—doubly so among Webster’s fellow Federalists. These guys felt a political allegiance to the Crown and an even greater allegiance to British-ness. Johnson had carefully dressed the language up in a corset, and the Federalists didn’t want to see it defiled. Some even suggested, as President John Adams did in 1780, that Congress establish a public institution—here we go again—“for refining, correcting, and ascertaining the English language.”22 (Johnson didn’t exactly reciprocate the respect he received from across the Atlantic, calling Americans “Rascles-Robbers-Pirates…a race of convicts” that “ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”)23
Yet Webster couldn’t find much love for his idea among Republicans either. The plan for a dictionary, and nearly as often Webster himself, were skewered by the ruling members of both parties. One criticism of Webster’s plan came from Joseph Dennie, a Boston-based journalist of Federalist persuasion: “If we once sanction the impertinence of individuals, who think themselves authorized to coin new words on every occasion, our language will soon become a confused jargon, which will require a new Dictionary every year.”24 Dennie’s concern is strikingly familiar to that expressed by Englishman John Dryden 150 years earlier, who feared that an unmoored English would drift so far away from the English of history’s literary greats that it would soon be unintelligible.
Stubborn, undeterred by naysayers, or both, Webster plowed ahead. In 1806 he published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. He was now a lexicographer first, spelling reformer second.25 At 408 pages and containing 37,000 entries, the dictionary was modest by fat-book standards, yet impressive in that Webster completed it alone and in less than six years. Unlike Johnson’s masterpiece, however, there were no quotations to enrich the short definitions—“orthoepy noun: the art of just pronunciation.”26 Still, the dictionary was audacious and controversial. For one thing, it included many new words; not just pond and caucus but also appellate, gin (cotton, not drink), butternut, whiskey, chore, snowshoe, and many more.
And new vocabulary was only the first part of his attempted language coup. Webster incorporated into the Compendious Dictionary what some people called “inventive spellings,” but what Webster saw as orthographic repairs that any “man of taste” in his position would have made. It was nothing less than his duty to rid the lexicon of “palpable inconsistencies and preposterous anomalies” that dishonor English literature while perplexing students.27 So ploughed became plowed, almanack became almanac, publick became public, soup became soop, humour became humor, determine became determin, gaol became jail, and group became groop.
The reception and sales of the 1806 dictionary were dismal. The original print run was seven thousand copies, and although the exact figures are unknown, it did not sell well; certainly not well enough to alleviate Webster’s financial pressures.28 A critic named James Savage chided Webster for believing that everyday people, not “learned men,” could be “sovereigns over the realms of language.”29 It’s an elegant summary of the more extreme prescriptivist world-view, if not an accidental admission that Savage and his ilk hadn’t bothered to take to heart what Samuel Johnson had written about compiling his dictionary: “I have often been obliged to sacrifice uniformity to custom,” Johnson wrote. Everyday usage rules.30
Here lies one of the most confounding aspects of Noah Webster’s life and work. On the one hand, he produced firebrand Federalist writings and beliefs. As Lepore writes, he was part of a fraternity of “well-heeled men who loved England, hated France, favored strong central government and despised all that was common.”31 Webster certainly had the “hated France” thing down. In the preface to his 1806 dictionary, he explains the need for spelling reform by reflecting on Old and Middle English, and specifically how French and Latin influences “disfigured” the language “with a class of mongrels, splendour, inferiour, authour, and the like.”32 He blamed Johnson for his “reverence to usage” and unwillingness to weed out the “palpable absurdity” of the letter u in these and other words.
On the other hand, Webster demonstrated a distinctly populist, which is to say a (then) Republican philosophy toward English and the composition of the dictionary. “The man who undertakes to censure others for the use of certain words and to decide what is or is not correct in language seems to arrogate to himself a dictatorial authority, the legitimacy of which will always be denied.”33 Mixing spelling reform into this already muddied mindset only magnifies the impression of a contradictory set of opinions. How could the same man simultaneously hold descriptivist views of language, while expecting everyone to follow his prescribed orthographic wisdom? Equally conflicting is Webster’s obsession with practical and efficient use of language and his understanding of how language evolves, versus his devotion to the impractical cause of spelling reform. Perhaps the best explanation for these apparent paradoxes is that in post-Revolutionary America, ideas about language were as variable as ideas about government. Webster, like the young nation itself, was struggling to find his identity.
Yet anyone who likes an underdog has got to admire Webster. In the wake of the failed first dictionary he readied himself for a lexicographical adventure that would dwarf his original effort.34 In 1807, he began on the big kahuna, working within the doughnut hole of a circular desk in his home in New Haven. A few years later he moved with his family to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he continued to tirelessly weave definitions.
Webster originally thought the new dictionary would take five years, maybe a bit longer. It took twenty-five. When An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828, America was a different country, and Webster a different man. As Lepore points out, opposition to the dictionary had vanished because the Federalist Party and most of Webster’s enemies were dead. The rise of Republicanism, meanwhile, meant the egalitarian underpinnings of the dictionary, and the great wordsmith’s descriptivist philosophy, were no longer incendiary. On the contrary, An American Dictionary was a welcome addition to nineteenth-century American homes. First-edition Johnson dictionaries were now more than seventy years old, and no less an authoritative figure than President Andrew Jackson was in need of this new reference book. Jackson was a crap speller.35
As he grew more mature, and as the years of defining went on, Webster either mollified his beliefs about spelling reform, or faked it for the sake of the dictionary’s success and the financial security of his family. The smart money says he softened his once rebellious views. As historian Thomas Gustafson writes: “Webster’s 1828 dictionary has been considered as much a work of cultural nationalism as his speller.” But instead of being a linguistic Declaration of Independence, “the dictionary was the linguistic Treaty of Paris, wherein Webster maintains that while difference of language between England and America is inevitable, a sameness is desirable.”36 He had finally reconciled the language’s—and the country’s—relationship with Britain. The title change itself is telling. In his forties, when he set out to write a “Dictionary of the American Languagé,” it was as if he was trying to strike a blow to the British (and Dr. Johnson) for their imperial grip on, well, everything. Two decades later, Webster realized that American English would never be as distinct from British English as Dutch is from German. English orthography would remain, for the most part, unchanged, and the title, An American Dictionary of the English Language, would do just fine.
The new dictionary cost about $20 ($364 today), which was about the same price as a grandfather clock.37 It contained seventy thousand entries, compared to Johnson’s forty-three thousand, although Webster did quite a lot of borrowing.* But with this new dictionary, Webster abandoned some of his early spelling reforms: groop, speek, cloke, spunge, determin, bilt
, fether, wimmen. But he did manage to permanently alter, at least for American English, hundreds of other “outlaws of orthography.”38 Jail (gaol), center (centre), theater (theatre), mask (masque), judgment (judgement), public (publick), music (musick), offense (offence), color (colour), mold (mould), and more. Expressions and occasional grammar rules separate American and British English today, but it’s primarily differing spellings, most of them conceived by Webster, that compel publishers to print slightly different British and American editions of the same book.
The question of spelling evolution and revolution, Morse told me, is really a study of how people collectively reach consensus about the shape of words. “With Webster, the question is: Can one individual have an impact on that consensus?” Noah’s life shows that the answer is, or at least it was, yes. His 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language wasn’t a bestseller, primarily because of the price. But it was an immense achievement and is a landmark of American scholarship.
During our drive back to the Merriam-Webster offices in Springfield, Morse said there were many Noah Websters. The struggling schoolteacher, the later-in-life writer of acerbic essays, the idealistic youngster preaching about the ingredients of healthy democracy, the more tempered fifty-something, who replaced radical ideas for spelling reform with moderate and realistic goals. “Somewhere on that arc he’s most interesting to me,” said Morse. “When he sees that he can’t be so idealistic, but he’s not so bitter that he thinks improving society is impossible.” It was a strange idea: that orthographic change could make the world a better place. But it was a catchy one, and would soon captivate some of the most powerful people in the world.