Webster's Dictionary

Noah Webster (1758–1843), the author of the readers and spelling books which dominated the American market at the time, spent decades of research in compiling his dictionaries.

In it, he popularized features which would become a hallmark of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.)

[9] When Webster died, in 1843, his heirs sold unbound sheets of his 1841 revision American Dictionary of the English Language to the firm of J. S. & C. Adams of Amherst, Massachusetts.

This firm bound and published a small number of copies in 1844 – the same edition that Emily Dickinson used as a tool for her poetic composition.

[14] Scholars have long seen Webster's 1844 dictionary to be an important resource for reading poet Emily Dickinson's life and work; she once commented that the "Lexicon" was her "only companion" for years.

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 represented a part of a larger dialectical play between liberty and order within Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary political debates.

It was sometimes referred to as the Webster–Mahn edition, because it featured revisions by 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.

James A.H. Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (1879–1928) says Webster's unabridged edition of 1864 "acquired an international fame.

The Merriam Company issued a complete revision in 1909, Webster's New International Dictionary, edited by William Torrey Harris and F. Sturges Allen.

Notable improvement was made in the treatment and number of discriminated synonyms, comparisons of subtle shades of meaning.

Some versions added a 400-page supplement called A Reference History of the World, which provided chronologies "from earliest times to the present".

The editors claimed more than 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".

The numerous picture plates added to the book's appeal and usefulness, particularly when pertaining to things found in nature.

[21] 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.

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.

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 print edition.

Planning for a Fourth edition of the Unabridged began with a 1988 memo from Merriam-Webster president William Llewellyn but was repeatedly deferred in favor of updates to the more lucrative Collegiate.

In January 2013, the Third New International website service was rebranded as the Unabridged with the first "Release" of 4,800 new and revised entries added to the site.

The revised website is not branded as the "Fourth edition" and it is unlikely that a print version will ever be produced, because demand is declining and its increased size would make it unwieldy and expensive.

This dictionary is preferred as a source "for general matters of spelling" by The Chicago Manual of Style, which is followed by many book publishers and magazines in the United States.

Following legal action by Merriam, successive US courts ruled by 1908 that Webster's entered the public domain when the Unabridged did, in 1889.

[28][29] Although Merriam-Webster revisers find solid ground in Noah Webster's concept of the English language as an ever-changing tapestry, the issue is more complicated than that.

So many dictionaries of varied size and quality have been called Webster's that the name no longer has any specific brand meaning.

even established dictionaries with no direct link to Noah Webster whatsoever have adopted his name, adding to the confusion.

The American edition of Charles Annandale's four volume revision of The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1883 by the Century Company, was more comprehensive than the Unabridged.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which published its complete first edition in 1933, challenged Merriam in scholarship, though not in the marketplace due to its much larger size.

After the commercial success of Webster's Third New International in the 1960s,[32] Random House responded by adapting 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.

Other medium-sized dictionaries have since entered the market, including the New Oxford American and the Encarta Webster's, while Merriam-Webster has not attempted to compete by issuing a similar edition.

Offline versions in Apple Mac Dictionary, SWORD module, StarDict, Rakuten Kobo, and Amazon Kindle formats are available from Akai Tsurugi.