Noah Webster's "American Dictionary of The English Language"
Noah Webster (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 included 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.
Read more about this topic: Webster's Dictionary
Famous quotes containing the words noah webster, noah, webster, american, dictionary, english and/or language:
“... word-sniffing ... is an addiction, like glue—or snow—sniffing in a somewhat less destructive way, physically if not economically.... As an addict ... I am almost guiltily interested in converts to my own illness, and in a pinch I can recommend nearly any reasonable solace, whether or not it qualifies as a true descendant of Noah Webster.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the
wine.””
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.”
—John Webster (1580–1625)
“I will put in my poems, that with you is heroism, upon land and sea—And
I will report all heroism from an American point of view.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I am hungry and you give me
a dictionary to decipher.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)