Tag: lexicography

Calendar: October 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of October

Three Yellow Boards

October 16, 1758, was the birthdate of lexicographer Noah Webster.

Noah Webster enrolled in Yale just before his 16th birthday and graduated in 1778 with a liberal degree. After a break in his studies, Webster returned to college, studied law, and passed his bar examination in 1781. Turning to literary work to channel his ambitions, Webster wrote a series of well-received articles justifying the American Revolution and arguing for permanent separation from Britain. He then founded a private school in Goshen, New York, and, by 1785 had written his speller, a grammar book and a reader for elementary schools.

In December of 1793 Noah Webster founded New York’s first daily newspaper “American Minerva”, later known as the ‘Commercial Advertiser”, which he edited for four years and wrote the equivalent of twenty volumes of articles and editorials. As a Federalist spokesman, he defended the administrations of Washington and Adams, especially their neutral policy to Britain and France, and criticized the terror of the French Revolution.

Moving in 1798 to New Haven, Connecticut, Noah Webster was elected as a Federalist to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and again in 1802-1807. The Copyright Act of 1831 was the first major statutory revision of copyright law in the United States, a result of lobbying by Webster and his agents in Congress. He also had an important role in lobbying individual states to pass American copyright laws.

Noah Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books; so he began writing the three volume compendium “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language”: a speller published in 1783; a grammar book published in 1784; and a reader published in 1785. He believed that the people-at-large must control the language, and popular sovereignty in government must by accompanied by popular usage in language. These books were arranged so that the subjects could be easily taught to students, and each section progressed by the age of the students.

In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary. In 1807 he began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, “An American Dictionary of the English Language”, a feat that took twenty-six years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-eight languages, hoping to standardize the American speech throughout the country.

Noah Webster’s dictionary contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never before appeared in a dictionary. Though it now has an honored place in the history of the American Language, it only sold 2,500 copies. By mortgaging his house, Webster found the funds to publish a second edition in two volumes, however as a result, his remaining life was plagued with debt. On May 28, 1843, a few days after revising an appendix to his work, Noah Webster died.

Calendar: February 1

Year: Day to Day Men: February 1

A Pose for Spring

February 1st of 1884 marks the publishing of volume one of “The Oxford English Dictionary”, designed to provide an inventory of English words in use since the mid-twelfth century. The ten-volume set was not completely published until April of 1928. The definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, mostly in order of historical occurrence, are illustrated with approximately two-million four-hundred thousand quotations from English-language literature and records. 

In 1857, London’s Philological Society suggested the publication of the dictionary and the collection of materials quickly followed. With the appointment of Scottish lexicographer Sir James Murray as editor in chief, editorial work began in 1879. Murray, during his time as editor, was responsible for approximately half of the dictionary. This included all entries from the letter a through d, h through k, and all entries in the letters k,o,p and t.  Three more editors succeeded Murray during the course of the printing: British philologist and lexicographer Henry Bradley, Scottish language and literature professor William Alexander Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions who became an Oxford lecturer and held the post of Fellow Librarian.

The original inventory of English words was entitled “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principals”, a twelve volume set with a one volume supplement. The 1884-1928 ten-volume edition “The Oxford English Dictionary”, initially edited by Murray and others, was the corrected and updated revision of the original set. In 1933, “The Oxford English Dictionary” was reissued again as a twelve volume set accompanied by a one volume supplement. A four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” that treated new words in English use, was printed between 1972 and 1986.

The second full edition of “The Oxford English Dictionary”, known as OED2, was published in 1989 by the Oxford University Press. Two more volumes of additions were added in 1993 and 1997, and work was begun on a complete revision of the entire body of work for a projected third edition.