Date: Fri 13-Oct-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: CAROLL

Illustration: C

Quick Words:

Noah-Webster-Dictionary

Full Text:

(short on Noah Webster)

Webster's Week Celebrates The American Language

The week of October 15-21 marks the second annual celebration of Dictionary

Week, commemorating the 237th birthday of Noah Webster and bringing attention

to the dictionary and its impact on daily life.

Festivities began early, with a Celebrity Dictionary Auction at the Noah

Webster House in Hartford on September 29 to benefit the House in its efforts

to preserve Webster's birthplace and to continue its educational programs.

Among the celebrities who lent support with their signatures of copies of

Merriam-Webster dictionaries were Meryl Streep, George Burns, Oprah Winfrey,

Walter Cronkite, Bob Dole and Big Bird, among others.

Often described as a man who truly helped invent America, Webster was one of

this nation's most ardent patriots, who fought for its Constitution, fathered

its copyright laws, wrote its first grammar, proselytized for higher

education, encouraged its cultural and political education - and became its

greatest lexicographer.

Noah Webster spent 27 years writing, with a quill pen, his 70,000-word

dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language , published in

1828. His dictionaries were the first to include words of American origin such

as "snowshoe," "tomahawk," "skunk" and "chowder." He instilled in the art of

dictionary craft the sensitivity for new words evolving in the United States.

In the most recent edition of their dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate

Dictionary, Tenth Edition, there are 160,000 entries, 211,000 definitions,

130,000 synonyms, antonyms, related and contrasted words and idioms. New words

of American origin include such entries as "dweeb," "New Age," "hip-hop,"

"boom box," "biodiversity" and "radwaste."

All the information in today's dictionary can fit on a computer disk and is

easily accessed in seconds by countless categories, allowing the user to

explore and discover language in a whole new way.

Noah Webster was born in West Harford, Conn., on October 16, 1758, and died at

the age of 85 in New Haven. Upon his death in 1843, George and Charles

Merriam, printers and booksellers in Springfield, Mass., acquired the rights

to the 1841 edition of Webster's dictionary. Foresighted and industrious, the

Merriam brothers assembled a group of top scholars, including two members of

the Webster family, to carry forward the book that would become a household

standard for English language in American families across the nation: The

Merriam-Webster Dictionary .

Though Noah Webster could not have imagined the applications of his

contributions in today's technological society, the implications of his work

are no less important than they were two centuries ago. In language, culture,

government and education, he was instrumental in shaping what we are today

and, in that sense, his legacy lives on, as it also does in American

dictionaries.