25 for 25. Webster’s dictionary (1828)

“In the year 1783, just at the close of the revolution, I published an elementary book for facilitating the acquisition of our vernacular tongue and for correcting a vicious pronunciation which prevailed extensively among the common people of this country,” Noah Webster wrote in 1828. A native of Connecticut who grew to adulthood during the American Revolution, Webster had been a lawyer, a schoolteacher, a newspaper editor and an elected official. He was a conservative, a Federalist, a pedant and a snob. He was also a patriot and an American nationalist.

A new country needed a new language, Webster judged. Or at least its own version of the language it inherited from Britain. “It is not only important but in a degree necessary that the people of this country should have an American dictionary of the English language, for although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist. Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.” The British people had failed to preserve an identity of ideas, and the failure caused British Americans to bolt the British empire. Their ideas having become distinct from Britain’s, so the Americans’ language was becoming different.

“The necessity therefore of a dictionary suited to the people of the United States is obvious,” Webster wrote in the preface of just such a dictionary, which he called An American Dictionary of the English Language.

America’s population equaled Britain’s by the time of Webster’s writing. It was growing much faster. More people soon would be speaking American English than British English. They would take over the world. “Our language, within two centuries, will be spoken by more people in this country than any other language on earth, except the Chinese in Asia, and even that may not be an exception,” Webster said. All the more reason to raise the Stars and Stripes in Anglophonia.

Webster’s dictionary popularized variants of spelling that had already crept into American English. Centre became center, colour became color, recognise became recognize. In his usage notes, Webster cited American authors rather than British authors. He pointed out how meanings had changed on the western side of the Atlantic. “No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate and assembly, court, &c., for although these are words used in England, yet they are applied in this country to express ideas which they do not express in that country.”

Webster’s dictionary was an aspect of and a contributor to a literary nationalism that emerged in America during his life and after. American authors began writing on American themes and in American vernacular. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made Americans cheer with his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” and mythologized American Indian life in his epic “Song of Hiawatha.” Nathaniel Hawthorne probed deeper but still distinctively American themes in The Scarlet Letter. James Fenimore Cooper gave Americans their first homegrown hero, Natty Bumppo, in The Leatherstocking Tales. Mark Twain and Herman Melville followed, writing about America and its people without a hint of provincialism.

“I present it to my fellow citizens,” Webster said of his dictionary, “not with frigid indifference but with my ardent wishes for their improvement and their happiness, and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of character, and the glory of my country.”

He added, with remarkable prescience regarding America’s growth in the following two centuries, that his desire was “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people who are destined to occupy and, I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.” The 335 million of us who follow his guidelines in America might raise a glass in his honour—or rather, honor.