Noah Webster's great dictionary flopped, then two brothers bought it
Noah Webster spent two decades on his American Dictionary, learning 26 languages to trace word origins. Published in 1828 when he was 70, it sold just 2,500 copies and left him in debt. After his death, two printers from Springfield bought the rights, and the name Merriam-Webster has been on dictionaries ever since.
Webster wanted Americans to speak and spell alike, since usage varied from region to region. His dictionary held 70,000 words, around 12,000 of them never before listed anywhere. As a spelling reformer he thought English rules were needlessly complicated, so he turned colour into color, centre into center and waggon into wagon, and he added American words such as skunk and squash that British dictionaries ignored. A two-volume second edition in 1840 finally sold well.
George and Charles Merriam had founded their firm in 1831, and in 1843 they acquired Webster's work from his estate. At first they only added sections, but their 1864 edition rewrote much of the text while keeping many definitions. The books kept growing: by 1884 an edition claimed 118,000 words, and the New International editions of 1909 and 1934 passed half a million. The Collegiate Dictionary, launched in 1898, reached its twelfth edition in November 2025.
The biggest row came in 1961 with Webster's Third New International, edited by Philip Gove. Beyond trimming punctuation and full sentences, it moved away from telling people how they ought to use English and toward describing how they actually did, which many critics hated. In 1964 the company became part of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Having lost exclusive use of the Webster name, it adopted the name Merriam-Webster in the early 1980s.
Its method still rests on evidence gathered by hand. Editors spend about an hour a day reading everything from novels to product packaging, noting how words are used. The citation file holds more than 16 million examples, millions of them on paper index cards going back to the late 19th century, and entries have gone into an electronic database since 2009. The Chicago Manual of Style names it the preferred authority on spelling.
Source: Merriam-Webster
