Noah Webster gave Americans 'color' and 'center', then his dictionary sold poorly
Noah Webster was 70 when his great American dictionary appeared in 1828, with 70,000 entries, far more than any before it. Priced at $20, it barely sold. Federalists called it vulgar, rivals called him mad, and yet his name became so linked with dictionaries that Webster's is now a generic American trademark.
Webster already dominated the market for spelling books and readers when he turned to lexicography. His first effort, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language of 1806, popularised the spellings that now mark American English, such as center for centre, honor for honour and program for programme, and brought in technical terms from the arts and sciences. Decades of research went into what followed.
An American Dictionary of the English Language came out in two quarto volumes printed in an edition of 2,500 copies. When the price dropped to $15, sales picked up, and the edition had sold out by 1836. Politics coloured its reception: conservative Federalists thought the word list too inclusive, while Jeffersonian Republicans mocked the man behind it. At 82, working with his son William, Webster issued a revised edition in 1841, two years before his death.
His heirs sold unbound sheets of that revision to J. S. & C. Adams of Amherst, which bound a few copies in 1844. One became the constant companion of Emily Dickinson, who described the lexicon as her sole companion for years; a biographer compared her reading of it to a priest poring over his breviary. Adams then sold the rights to G & C Merriam of Springfield, and a Merriam imprint first appeared in 1845.
Merriam kept expanding. Chauncey Goodrich, Webster's son-in-law, trimmed his quirks in 1847. Noah Porter's 1864 edition, with 114,000 entries, was the first real overhaul and the first called the Unabridged; the Oxford English Dictionary's editor James Murray said it won international fame as the leading authority on meaning. Porter's 1890 International held about 175,000 entries and, digitised in 1996, heavily influenced Wiktionary. The 1909 New International passed 400,000 entries and squeezed rare words into fine print at the foot of each page. Merriam-Webster remains the corporate heir, though Webster's own works are now in the public domain.
Source: Webster's Dictionary
