Webster's Dictionary refers to the line of dictionaries first developed by
Noah WebsterNoah Webster was an American educator, lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author...
in the early 19th century, and also to numerous unrelated dictionaries that added Webster's name just to share his prestige. The term is a
genericized trademarkA genericized trademark is a trademark or brand name that has become the colloquial or generic description for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, rather than as an indicator of source or affiliation as intended by the trademark's holder...
in the U.S.A. for comprehensive dictionaries of the English language.
Noah Webster's "American Dictionary of the English Language"
Noah WebsterNoah Webster was an American educator, lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author...
(1758–1843), the author of the readers and spelling books that dominated the American market at the time, spent decades of research in compiling his dictionaries. His first dictionary,
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in 1806. In it, he introduced features that would be a hallmark of future editions such as American spellings (
center rather than
centre,
honor rather than
honour,
program rather than
programme, etc.) and including technical terms from the arts and sciences rather than confining his dictionary to literary words. He spent the next two decades working to expand his dictionary.
ADEL first edition 1828
In 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published his
American Dictionary of the English Language (ADEL) in two quarto volumes containing 70,000 entries, as against the 58,000 of any previous dictionary. There were only 2,500 copies printed, at $20 for the two volumes. Partially due to the relatively high price, the book sold poorly and all copies were not bound up at the same time; the book also appeared in publisher's boards; other original bindings of a later date are not unknown.
1841 printing
In 1841, 82-year-old Noah Webster published a revised and expanded edition of his lexicographical masterpiece in two volumes, a
2nd Edition, Corrected and Enlarged of the
American Dictionary of the English Language, with the help of his son, William G. Webster. It was published in
octavoOctavo to is a technical term describing the format of a book.Octavo may also refer to:* Octavo is a grimoire in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett...
size, and contained the whole vocabulary of the quarto (1st edition), with corrections, improvements and five thousand additional words. Published by the author, the first printing was in 1841 by B.L. Hamlen, of New Haven.
1844 printing
When Webster died, his heirs sold unbound sheets of his 1841 Revised
American Dictionary of the English Language to the firm of J.S. & C. Adams of
Amherst, MassachusettsAmherst is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States in the Connecticut River valley. As of the 2010 census, the population was 37,819, making it the largest community in Hampshire County . The town is home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts...
. This firm bound and published a small number of copies in 1844 – the same edition that
Emily DickinsonEmily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
used as a tool for her poetic composition. However, a $15 price tag on the book made it too expensive to sell easily, so the Amherst firm decided to sell out. Merriam acquired rights from Adams, as well as signing a contract with Webster’s heirs for sole rights.
1845 printing
A third printing of the ADEL second edition was in 1845 by George & Charles Merriam,
Springfield, MassachusettsSpringfield is the most populous city in Western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers; the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern...
, and this was the first "Webster's Dictionary" with a Merriam imprint.
Impact
Lepore (2008) demonstrates Webster's innovative ideas about language and politics and shows why Webster's endeavors were at first so poorly received. Culturally conservative Federalists denounced the work as radical—too inclusive in its lexicon and even bordering on vulgar. Meanwhile Webster's old foes the Jeffersonian Republicans attacked the man, labeling him mad for such an undertaking.
Scholars have long seen Webster's 1844 dictionary to be an important resource for reading poet
Emily DickinsonEmily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
's life and work; she once commented that the "Lexicon" was her "only companion" for years. One biographer said, "The dictionary was no mere reference book to her; she read it as a priest his breviary – over and over, page by page, with utter absorption."
Austin (2005) explores the intersection of lexicographical and poetic practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's dictionaries. He shows the ways in which American poetry has inherited Webster and drawn upon his lexicography in order to reinvent it. Austin explicates key definitions from both the
Compendious (1806) and
American (1828) dictionaries and brings into its discourse a range of concerns including the politics of American English, the question of national identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, and the poetics of citation and of definition.
Webster's dictionaries were a redefinition of Americanism within the context of an emergent and unstable American socio-political and cultural identity. Webster's identification of his project as a "federal language" shows his competing impulses towards regularity and innovation in historical terms. Perhaps the contradictions of Webster's project comprised part of a larger dialectical play between liberty and order within Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary political debates.
The Century Dictionary and CyclopediaThe Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by The Century Company of New York, in six, eight, or ten volume versions in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations...
, was based on Noah Webster’s
American Dictionary edition of 1841.
"Webster's" Dictionaries by others
Noah Webster's assistant, and later chief competitor,
Joseph Emerson WorcesterJoseph Emerson Worcester was an American lexicographer and chief competitor of Webster's Dictionary in the mid-nineteenth-century. Their rivalry became known as the "dictionary wars". Worcester's dictionaries focused on traditional pronunciation and spelling, unlike Noah Webster's attempts to...
, and Webster's son-in-law Chauncey A. Goodrich, published an abridgment of Noah Webster's 1828
American Dictionary of the English Language in 1829, with the same number of words and Webster's full definitions, but without the literary references. Although it was more successful financially than the original 1828 edition and was reprinted many times, Noah Webster was critical of it. Worcester and Goodrich's abridgment of Noah Webster's 1841 (1844) edition was printed, this time by Harper and Brothers of New York City, in 1844, with added words as an appendix.
New and Revised edition 1847
Upon Webster's death in 1843, the unsold books and all rights to the copyright and name "Webster" were purchased by brothers
GeorgeGeorge Merriam was a publisher. With his brother Charles, he founded G. and C. Merriam, which would eventually become Merriam-Webster, Inc....
and Charles Merriam, who then hired Webster's son-in-law Chauncey A. Goodrich, a professor at
Yale CollegeYale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...
, to oversee revisions. Goodrich's
New and Revised Edition appeared on September 24, 1847, and a
Revised and Enlarged edition in 1859, which added a section of illustrations indexed to the text. His revisions remained close to Webster's work, although removing what later editors referred to as his "excrescences".
British impact
Webster's dictionaries dominated the English speaking world. In 1850, for example, Blackie and Son in Glasgow published the first general dictionary of English that relied heavily upon pictorial illustrations integrated with the text. Its
The Imperial Dictionary, English, Technological, and Scientific, Adapted to the Present State of Literature, Science, and Art; On the Basis of Webster's English Dictionary used Webster's for most of their text, adding some additional technical words that went with illustrations of machinery.
Unabridged edition 1864
In response to Joseph Worcester's groundbreaking dictionary of 1860, the
G. & C. Merriam Company created a significantly revised edition, retaining the title
American Dictionary of the English Language. It was edited by
Yale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
editor
Noah PorterNoah Porter, Jr. was an American academic, philosopher, author, lexicographer and President of Yale College .-Biography:...
and published in 1864, containing 114,000 entries. It was sometimes referred to as the
Webster–Mahn edition, because it featured revisions by Dr. C. A. F. Mahn, who replaced unsupportable etymologies which were based on Webster's attempt to conform to Biblical interpretations of the history of language. It was the first edition to largely overhaul Noah Webster's work, and the first to be known as the
Unabridged. Later printings included additional material: a "Supplement Of Additional Words And Definitions" containing over 4,600 new words and definitions in 1879,
A Pronouncing Biographical Dictionary containing over 9,700 names of noteworthy persons in 1879, and a
Pronouncing Gazetteer in 1884. The 1883 printing of the book contained 1,928 pages and was 8+1/2 in wide by 11+1/2 in tall by 4+1/4 in thick. The 1888 printing (revision?) is similarly sized, with the last printed page number "1935" which has on its back further content (hence, 1936th page), and closes with "Whole number of pages 2012." This dictionary carries the 1864 Preface by Noah Porter with postscripts of 1879 and 1884.
Murray (the historian of the later
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
) says Webster's unabridged edition of 1864, "acquired an international fame. It was held to be superior to every other dictionary and taken as the leading authority on the meaning of words, not only in America and England, but also throughout the Far East."
Webster’s International Dictionary (1890 and 1900)
Porter also edited the succeeding edition,
Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language (1890), which was an expansion of the
American Dictionary. It contained about 175,000 entries. In 1900,
Webster’s International was republished with a supplement that added 25,000 entries to it.
Webster's New International Dictionary 1909
The Merriam Company issued a complete revision in 1909,
Webster's New International Dictionary, edited by William Torey Harris and F. Sturges Allen. Vastly expanded, it covered over 400,000 entries, and double the number of illustrations. A new format feature, the
divided page, was designed to save space by including a section of
words below the line at the bottom of each page: six columns of very fine print, devoted to such items as rarely used, obsolete, and foreign words, abbreviations, and variant spellings. Notable improvement was made in the treatment and number of
discriminated synonyms, comparisons of subtle shades of meaning. Also added was a twenty-page chart comparing the Webster's pronunciations with those offered by six other major dictionaries.
Webster’s New International Dictionary (second edition, 1934)
In 1934, the
New International Dictionary was revised and expanded for a second edition, which is popularly known as “Webster’s Second” or W2, although it was not published under that title. It was edited by William Allen Neilson and Thomas A. Knott. It contained 3350 pages and sold for $39.50. Some versions added a 400-page supplement called “A Reference History of the World,” which provided
chronologiesChronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...
“from earliest times to the present.” The editors claimed over 600,000 entries, more than any other dictionary at that time, but that number included many proper names and newly added lists of undefined “combination words”. Multiple definitions of words are listed in chronological order, with the oldest, and often obsolete, usages listed first. For example, the first definition of
starve includes dying of exposure to the elements as well as from lack of food.
The numerous picture plates added to the book's appeal and usefulness, particularly when pertaining to things found in nature. Conversely, the plate showing the coins of the world's important nations quickly proved to be ephemeral. Numerous gold coins from various important countries were included, including American eagles, at a time when it had recently become illegal for Americans to own them, and when most other countries had withdrawn gold from active circulation as well.
Early printings of this dictionary contained the famous
dordDord is a notable error in lexicography, an accidental creation, or ghost word, of the G. and C. Merriam Company's staff included in the second edition of its New International Dictionary, in which the term is defined as "density"....
.
Because of its style and word coverage, “Webster’s Second” is still a popular dictionary. For example, in the case of
Miller Brewing Co. v. G. Heileman Brewing Co., Inc., 561 F.2d 75 (7th Cir. 1977) – a trademark dispute in which the terms “lite” and “light” were held to be generic for light beer and therefore available for use by anyone – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, after considering a definition from
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, wrote that “[T]he comparable definition in the previous, and for many the classic, edition of the same dictionary is as follows:...”
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961)
After about a decade of preparation, G. & C. Merriam issued the entirely new
Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (commonly known as
Webster's Third, or
W3) in September 1961. It was edited by
Philip Babcock GovePhilip Babcock Gove was an American lexicographer who was editor-in-chief of the controversial Webster's Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961....
and a team of lexicographers who spent 757 editor-years and $3.5 million. It contained more than 450,000 entries, including over 100,000 new entries and as many new senses for entries carried over from previous editions.
The final definition,
ZyzzogetonZyzzogeton is a rare genus of leafhopper endemic to South America.The word is known for being the last word defined in the Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged released in September 1961. It also appears in the 1939 Second edition, and is still present in current versions....
, was written on October 17, 1960; the final etymology was recorded on October 26; and the final pronunciation was transcribed on November 9. The final copy went to the typesetters, R. R. Donnelley, on December 2. The book was printed by the Riverside Press in
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. The first edition had 2,726 pages (measuring 9 in (22.9 cm) wide by 13 in (33 cm) tall by 3 in (7.6 cm) thick), weighed 13½ lbs (6.12 kg), and originally sold for $47.50 (about $350 in 2010 dollars). The changes were the most radical in the history of the
Unabridged.
Although it was an unprecedented masterwork of scholarship, it was met with considerable criticism for its descriptive (rather than prescriptive) approach. It told how the language was used, not how it ought to be used.
Deletions
Prior to
Webster's Third the
Unabridged had been expanded with each new edition, with very minimal deletion. To make room for 100,000 new words, Gove now made sweeping deletions, dropping 250,000 entries. He eliminated the "nonlexical matter" that more properly belongs to an encyclopedia, including all names of people and places (which had filled two appendices). There were no more mythological, biblical, and fictional names, nor the names of buildings, historical events, or art works. Thirty picture plates were dropped. The rationale was that, while useful, these are not strictly about language. Gove justified the change by the company's publication of
Webster's Biographical Dictionary in 1943 and
Webster's Geographical DictionaryMerriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary is a gazetteer by the publisher Merriam-Webster. The latest edition was released in 2001, edited by Daniel J. Hopkins and contained over 54,000 entries...
in 1949, and the fact that the topics removed could be found in encyclopedias.
Also removed were words which had been virtually out of use for over two hundred years (except those found in major literature such as Shakespeare), rare variants, reformed spellings, self-explanatory combination words, and other items considered of little value to the general reader. The number of small text illustrations was reduced, page size increased, and print size reduced by one-twelfth, from six point to agate (5.5 point) type. All this was considered necessary because of the large amount of new material, and
Webster's Second had almost reached the limits of mechanical
bookbindingBookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...
. The fact that the new book had about 700 fewer pages was justified by the need to allow room for future additions.
In style and method, the dictionary bore little resemblance to earlier editions. Headwords (except for "God", initialisms, and, in the reprints, trademarks) were not capitalized. Instead of capitalizing "American", for example, the dictionary had labels next to the entries reading
cap (for the noun) and
usu cap (for the adjective). This allowed informative distinctions to be drawn: "gallic" is
usu cap while "gallicism" is
often cap and "gallicize" is
sometimes cap.
Reception and criticisms
The reviews of the Third edition were highly favorable in Britain.
Robert Chapman, a lexicographer, canvassed fellow lexicographers at
Funk and WagnallsFunk & Wagnalls was an American publisher known for its reference works, including A Standard Dictionary of the English Language , and the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia Funk & Wagnalls was an American publisher known for its reference works, including A Standard Dictionary of the English...
who had used the new edition daily for three years. The consensus held that the Third was a "marvelous achievement, a monument of scholarship and accuracy". They did come up with some specific criticisms, including typographic unattractiveness (the type is too small and hard to read); non-use of capital letters (only "God" was capitalized; the goal was to save space); excessive use of citations, giving misspellings as legitimate variants, dropping too many obsolete words, the lack of usage labels, and deliberate omission of biographical and geographical entries. Chapman concluded that the "cranks and intransigents who advise us to hang on to the NID 2 are plain fools who deny themselves the riches of a great book.".
This dictionary became preferred as a backup source by two influential style guides in the United States, although each one directs writers to go first to other, shorter dictionaries.
The Chicago Manual of StyleThe Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 16 editions have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publishing...
, followed by many book publishers and magazines in the United States, recommends
Webster's Third, along with
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for "general matters of spelling", and the style book "normally opts for" the first spelling listed (with the
Collegiate taking precedence over
Webster's Third because it "represents the latest research").
The Associated Press Stylebook, used by most newspapers in the United States, refers readers to
W3 "if there is no listing in either this book or
Webster's New World".
Permissiveness
In the early 1960s
Webster's Third came under attack for its "permissiveness" and its failure to tell people what proper English was. It was the opening shot in the culture wars, as conservatives detected yet another symbol of the permissiveness of society as a whole and the decline of authority, as represented by the
Second Edition. As historian Herbert Morton explained, "
Webster's Second was more than respected. It was accepted as the ultimate authority on meaning and usage and its preeminence was virtually unchallenged in the United States. It did not provoke controversies, it settled them." Critics charged that the dictionary was reluctant to defend standard English, for example entirely eliminating the labels "colloquial", "correct", "incorrect", "proper", "improper", "erroneous", "humorous", "jocular", "poetic", and "contemptuous", among others.
Gove's stance was an exemplar of descriptivist linguistics: describing language as it is or has been used. As David M. Glixon put it in the
Saturday Review: "Having descended from God's throne of supreme authority, the Merriam folks are now seated around the city desk, recording like mad."
Jacques BarzunJacques Martin Barzun is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He has written on a wide range of topics, but is perhaps best known as a philosopher of education, his Teacher in America being a strong influence on post-WWII training of schoolteachers in the United...
said this stance made
Webster's Third "the longest political pamphlet ever put together by a party", done with "a dogma that far transcends the limits of lexicography".
Ain't
The dictionary's treatment of "ain't" was subject to particular scorn, since it seemed to overrule the near-unanimous denunciation of that word by English teachers. The
New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at the dictionary's office telling a visitor that "Dr. Gove ain’t in." The entry said, "though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase
ain't I".
The Globe and Mail of Toronto editorialized: "a dictionary's embrace of the word 'ain't' will comfort the ignorant, confer approval upon the mediocre, and subtly imply that proper English is the tool of only the snob".
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
editorialized that "Webster's has, it is apparent, surrendered to the permissive school that has been busily extending its beachhead in English instruction in the schools ... reinforced the notion that good English is whatever is popular" and "can only accelerate the deterioration" of the English language. The
Times' widely respected
Theodore M. BernsteinTheodore Menline Bernstein was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times and from 1925 to 1950 a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism.-Biography:...
, its in-house style authority and a professor of journalism at Columbia University, reported that most of the newspaper's editors decided to continue to use the
Webster's Second.
Garry WillsGarry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and prolific author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American politics, American political history and ideology and the Roman Catholic Church. Classically trained at a Jesuit high school and two universities, he is proficient in Greek and Latin...
in the
National ReviewNational Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
opined that the new dictionary "has all the modern virtues. It is big, expensive, and ugly. It should be a great success".
In his
Nero WolfeNero Wolfe is a fictional detective, created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detective genius. Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 short stories from 1934 to 1974, with most of them set in New York City. Wolfe's...
novel
GambitGambit is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1962.-Plot introduction:A chess prodigy is poisoned during a club tournament, and the police arrest the member who served the victim hot chocolate...
(1962),
Rex StoutRex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. Stout is best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the...
famously depicted his erudite armchair detective burning pages from this edition in his fireplace because it sanctioned usages he disliked.
Criticism of the dictionary spurred the creation of the
American Heritage Dictionary, where 500 usage notes were determined by a panel of expert writers; the editor, however, often ignored their advice.
Revisions and updates
Since the 1961 publication of the
Third,
Merriam-WebsterMerriam–Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language .Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a...
has reprinted the main text of the dictionary with only minor corrections. To add new words, they created an
Addenda Section in 1966, included in the front matter, which was expanded in 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1993, and 2002. However, the rate of additions has been much slower than it had been throughout the previous hundred years.
Following the purchase of
Merriam-Webster by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. in 1964, a three-volume version was issued for many years as a supplement to the encyclopedia. At the end of volume three, this edition included the
Britannica World Language Dictionary, 474 pages of translations between English and French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Yiddish.
The Merriam-Webster staff has been working on the fourth edition (W4) of the
Unabridged since 2008, but a publication date has not yet been set.
A cd-rom version of the complete text, with thousands of additional new words and definitions from the "addenda", was published by Merriam Webster in 2000, and is often packaged with the paper edition.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
Merriam-WebsterMerriam–Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language .Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a...
introduced its
Collegiate Dictionary in 1898 and the series is now in its 11th edition. Following the publication of
Webster's International in 1890, two
Collegiate editions were issued as abridgments of each of their
Unabridged editions.
With the 9th edition (
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (WNNCD), published in 1985), the
Collegiate adopted changes which distinguish it as a separate entity rather than merely an abridgment of the
Third New International (the main text of which has remained virtually unrevised since 1961). Some proper names were returned to the word list, including names of Knights of the Round Table. The most notable change was the inclusion of the date of the first known citation of each word, to document its entry into the English language. The 11th edition (published in 2003) includes over 225,000 definitions, and over 165,000 entries. A cd-rom of the text is sometimes included.
This dictionary is preferred as a source "for general matters of spelling" by the influential
The Chicago Manual of StyleThe Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 16 editions have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publishing...
, which is followed by many book publishers and magazines in the United States. The
Chicago Manual states that it "normally opts for" the first spelling listed.
The name Webster used by others
Since the late 19th century, dictionaries bearing the name
Webster's have been published by companies other than
Merriam-WebsterMerriam–Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language .Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a...
. Some of these were unauthorized reprints of Noah Webster's work; some were revisions of his work. One such revision was
Webster's Imperial Dictionary, based on John Ogilvie's
Imperial DictionaryThe Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological, edited by Rev. John Ogilvie , was an expansion of the 1841 second edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary. It was published by W. G...
, itself an expansion of Noah Webster's
American Dictionary.
Following legal action by Merriam, successive US courts ruled by 1908 that
Webster's entered the
public domainWorks are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
when the
Unabridged did, in 1889. In 1917, a US court ruled that
Webster's entered the public domain in 1834 when Noah Webster's 1806 dictionary's
copyrightCopyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
lapsed. Thus,
Webster's became a
genericized trademarkA genericized trademark is a trademark or brand name that has become the colloquial or generic description for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, rather than as an indicator of source or affiliation as intended by the trademark's holder...
and others were free to use the name on their own works.
Since then, use of the name
Webster has been rampant. Merriam-Webster goes to great pains to remind dictionary buyers that it alone is the heir to Noah Webster. The issue is more complicated than that, however. Throughout the 20th century, some non-Merriam editions, such as
Webster's New Universal, were closer to Webster's work than modern Merriam-Webster editions. Indeed, further revisions by Merriam-Webster came to have little in common with their original source, while the
Universal, for example, was minimally revised and remained largely out of date. However, Merriam-Webster revisionists find solid ground in Noah Webster's concept of the English language as an ever-changing tapestry.
So many dictionaries of varied size and quality have been called
Webster's that the name no longer has any specific
brandThe American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...
meaning. Despite this, many people still recognize and trust the name. Thus,
Webster's continues as a powerful and lucrative marketing tool. In recent years, even established dictionaries with no direct link to Noah Webster whatsoever have adopted his name, adding to the confusion.
Random House dictionariesRandom House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged....
are now called
Random House Webster's, and
MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's
EncartaMicrosoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
World English Dictionary is now
Encarta Webster's DictionaryThe Encarta Webster's Dictionary of the English Language is the second edition of the Encarta World English Dictionary, published in 1999 . Slightly larger than a college dictionary, it is similar in appearance and scope to the American Heritage Dictionary, which Soukhanov previously edited...
. The dictionary now called
Webster's New Universal no longer even uses the text of the original
Webster's New Universal dictionary, but rather is a newly commissioned version of the
Random House Dictionary.
The
Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition is not linked to Merriam-Webster OnLine. It is a multilingual online dictionary created in 1999 by
Philip M. ParkerPhilip M. Parker holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD . He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches...
. This site compiles different online dictionaries and
encyclopediaAn encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
including the
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), the
WiktionaryWiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
and
WikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
.
Competition
Noah Webster's main competitor was a man named
Joseph Emerson WorcesterJoseph Emerson Worcester was an American lexicographer and chief competitor of Webster's Dictionary in the mid-nineteenth-century. Their rivalry became known as the "dictionary wars". Worcester's dictionaries focused on traditional pronunciation and spelling, unlike Noah Webster's attempts to...
, whose 1830
Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language brought accusations of plagiarism from Webster. The rivalry was carried on by Merriam after Webster's death, in what is often referred to as the
Dictionary Wars. After Worcester's death in 1865, revision of his
Dictionary of the English Language was soon discontinued and it eventually went out of print.
The American edition of
Charles AnnandaleCharles Annandale was a Scottish editor, primarily of reference books.-Life:He was born at Fordoun on 26 August 1843, the son of James Annandale. He graduated M.A...
's four volume revision of the
Imperial DictionaryThe Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological, edited by Rev. John Ogilvie , was an expansion of the 1841 second edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary. It was published by W. G...
, published in 1883 by the Century Company, was more comprehensive than the
Unabridged. The
Century DictionaryThe Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by The Century Company of New York, in six, eight, or ten volume versions in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations...
, an expansion of the
Imperial first published from 1889 to 1891, covered a larger vocabulary until the publication of
Webster's Second in 1934, after the
Century had ceased publication.
In 1894 came
Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, an attractive one volume counterpart to
Webster's International. The expanded
New Standard of 1913 was a worthy challenge to the
New International, and remained a major competitor for many years. However, Funk & Wagnalls never revised the work, reprinting it virtually unchanged for over 50 years, while Merriam published two major revisions.
The
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(
OED), which published its complete first edition in 1933, challenged
Merriam in scholarship, though not in the marketplace due to its much larger size. The
New International editions continued to offer words and features not covered by the
OED, and vice versa. In the 1970s, the
OED began publishing
Supplements to its dictionary and in 1989 integrated the new words in the supplements with the older definitions and etymologies in its
Second Edition.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, several college dictionaries, notably the
American College Dictionary and (non-Merriam)
Webster's New World Dictionary, entered the market alongside the
Collegiate. Among larger dictionaries during this period was (non-Merriam)
Webster's Universal Dictionary (also published as
Webster's Twentieth Century Dictionary) which traced its roots to Noah Webster and called itself "unabridged", but had less than half the vocabulary and paled in scholarship against the
Merriam editions.
After the disappointing reception of
Webster's Third New International in the 1960s, the market was open for new challengers.
Random House adapted its college dictionary by adding more illustrations and large numbers of proper names, increasing its print size and page thickness, and giving it a heavy cover. In 1966, it was published as a new "unabridged" dictionary. It was expanded in 1987, but it still covered no more than half the actual vocabulary of
Webster's Third.
The American Heritage Publishing Co., highly critical of
Webster's Third, failed in an attempt to buy out Merriam-Webster and determined to create its own dictionary,
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. In 1969, it issued a college-sized dictionary, which has since been expanded and become one of the most popular English dictionaries. Now in its fourth edition, it is only slightly greater in vocabulary than the
Collegiate, but it appears much larger and has the appeal of many pictures and other features. Other medium-sized dictionaries have since entered the market, including the
New Oxford AmericanThe New Oxford American Dictionary is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press....
and the
Encarta Webster'sThe Encarta Webster's Dictionary of the English Language is the second edition of the Encarta World English Dictionary, published in 1999 . Slightly larger than a college dictionary, it is similar in appearance and scope to the American Heritage Dictionary, which Soukhanov previously edited...
, while Merriam-Webster has not attempted to compete by issuing a similar edition. All of these offer college editions, but
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate is the largest and most popular.
1828 edition
The 1828 of the
American Dictionary of the English Language (2 volumes; New York: S. Converse, 1828) edition can be searched online at:
DjvuDjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy...
versions can be viewed at at the www.archive.org site:
Plain text versions are also available from the above site (with some errors, due to automatic
OCROCR may refer to:* Optical character recognition, conversion of images of text into characters** The OCR-A font, designed to simplify character recognition** The similar OCR-B font* Transvaginal oocyte retrieval, a technique used in in vitro fertilization...
)
1841 (1844) edition
1913 edition
The dictionary's 1913 edition of the 1900
International, renamed
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, has in modern times been used in various free online resources, as its copyright lapsed and it became
public domainWorks are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
. Some of these resources include:
- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) are accessible via an online search
- The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is available as an E-text
An e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...
from Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
- The Online Plain Text English Dictionary is based on the Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
E-textAn e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...
version of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) for the DICT
DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group. It is described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries during use...
server.
- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913-ed.) Electronic dictionary in EPWING/JIS X 4081 format
- Collaborative International Dictionary of English
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English was derived from the 1913 Webster's Dictionary and has been supplemented with some of the definitions from WordNet...
and GCIDEGCIDE is the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.The dictionary was derived from the Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary Version published 1913 and WordNet.The GNU version is licensed under the GNU General Public License....
- dict.org DICT Development Group A WWW interface to several freely available on-line dictionaries.
- Webster's Online Dictionary, Rosetta Edition: see above, the name Webster used by others.
1961 Edition
Both the
Collegiate 1961 and the
Unabridged 1913 editions are searched by the free dictionary search engine
OneLook.
Latest editions
The latest edition of
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary can be searched online at the company's
website. The updated
Third New International is available online only by subscription.