77 Facts About Noah Webster

Noah Webster was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author.

Noah Webster has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education".

Noah Webster authored a large number of "Blue-Backed Speller" books which were used to teach American children how to spell and read.

Noah Webster is the author for the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.

Noah Webster passed the bar examination after studying law under Oliver Ellsworth and others but was unable to find work as a lawyer.

Noah Webster found some financial success by opening a private school and writing a series of educational books, including the "Blue-Backed Speller".

Noah Webster believed American nationalism had distinctive qualities that differed from European values.

In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited Noah Webster to move to New York City and become an editor for a Federalist Party newspaper.

Noah Webster became a prolific author, publishing newspaper articles, political essays, and textbooks.

Noah Webster returned to Connecticut in 1798 and served in the Connecticut House of Representatives.

Noah Webster founded the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1791 but later became somewhat disillusioned with the abolitionist movement.

In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.

Noah Webster played a role in advocating for copyright reform, contributing to the Copyright Act of 1831, the first major statutory revision of US copyright law.

Noah Webster was born into an established family, and the Noah Webster House continues to highlight his life and serves as the headquarters of the West Hartford Historical Society.

Noah Webster's father was primarily a farmer, though he was a deacon of the local Congregational church, captain of the town's militia, and a founder of a local book society, a precursor to the public library.

Noah Webster's mother spent long hours teaching her children spelling, mathematics, and music.

At age six, Noah Webster began attending a dilapidated one-room primary school built by West Hartford's Ecclesiastical Society.

Noah Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday, and during his senior year studied with Ezra Stiles, Yale's president.

Noah Webster was a member of Brothers in Unity, a secret society at Yale.

Noah Webster's father mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but after graduating, Webster had little contact with his family.

Noah Webster lacked clear career plans after graduating from Yale in 1779, later writing that a liberal arts education "disqualifies a man for business".

Noah Webster taught school briefly in Glastonbury, but due to harsh working conditions and low pay, he resigned to study law.

Noah Webster quit his legal studies for a year and lapsed into a depression; he then found another practicing attorney to tutor him, and completed his studies, and passed the bar examination in 1781.

Noah Webster received a master's degree from Yale by delivering an oral dissertation to the graduating class.

Proceeds from continuing sales of the popular blue-backed speller enabled Noah Webster to spend many years working on his famous dictionary.

Noah Webster was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the cultural thralldom to Europe.

Noah Webster aimed to create a utopian America, free from luxury and ostentation, and a champion of freedom.

Noah Webster dedicated his Speller and Dictionary to providing an intellectual foundation for American nationalism.

From 1787 to 1789, Noah Webster was an outspoken supporter of the new Constitution.

In political theory, Noah Webster emphasized widespread property ownership, a key element of Federalism.

Noah Webster was one of the few early American thinkers who applied the theories of the French theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau in America.

Noah Webster relied heavily on Rousseau's Social Contract while writing Sketches of American Policy, one of the earliest, widely-published arguments for a strong central government in America.

Noah Webster wrote two "fan fiction" sequels to Rousseau's Emile, or On Education and included them in his Reader for schoolchildren.

Noah Webster's Reader contains an idealized word portrait of Sophie, the girl in Rousseau's Emile, and Noah Webster used Rousseau's theories in Emile to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education.

Noah Webster joined the elite in Hartford, Connecticut, but did not have substantial financial resources.

Noah Webster published the semi-weekly publication The Herald, A Gazette for the country, later known as the New-York Spectator.

Noah Webster later defended Jay's Treaty between the United States and Britain.

In 1799 Noah Webster wrote two massive volumes on the causes of "epidemics and pestilential diseases".

Noah Webster was so prolific that a modern bibliography of his works spans 655 pages.

Noah Webster was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799.

Noah Webster moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1812, where he helped to found Amherst College.

In 1822, his family moved back to New Haven, where Noah Webster was awarded an honorary degree from Yale the following year.

In 1827, Noah Webster was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

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.

Noah Webster's aim was to provide a uniquely American approach to education.

Noah Webster complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation.

Noah Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar.

From his own experiences as a teacher, Noah Webster thought that the Speller should be simple and give an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation.

Noah Webster believed that students learned most readily when he broke a complex problem into its component parts and had each pupil master one part before moving to the next.

Ellis argues that Noah Webster anticipated some of the insights currently associated with Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Noah Webster said that children pass through distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex or abstract tasks.

Noah Webster organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words, then sentences.

Noah Webster chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center.

Noah Webster changed tongue to the older spelling tung, but this did not catch on.

Noah Webster included excerpts from Tom Paine's The Crisis and an essay by Thomas Day calling for the abolition of slavery in accord with the Declaration of Independence.

Later in life, Noah Webster became more religious and incorporated religious themes into his work.

However, after 1840, Noah Webster's books lost market share to the McGuffey Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey, which sold over 120 million copies.

Noah Webster acquired his perspective on language from such theorists as Maupertuis, Michaelis, and Herder.

In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.

Noah Webster's goal was to standardize American English, which varied widely across the country.

However, his level of understanding for these languages was challenged with Charlton Laird claiming that Noah Webster struggled with "elements of Anglo-Saxon grammar" and that he did "not recognize common words".

Thomas Pyles went on to write that Noah Webster showed "an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman".

Noah Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in January 1825 in a boarding house in Cambridge, England.

Noah Webster's book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before.

Noah Webster was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them.

At the age of seventy, Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828, registering the copyright on April 14.

Noah Webster was forced to mortgage his home to develop a second edition, and for the rest of his life, he had debt problems.

Noah Webster is buried in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery.

Austin argues that Noah Webster's dictionaries helped redefine Americanism in an era of highly flexible cultural identity.

Noah Webster himself saw the dictionaries as a nationalizing device to separate America from Britain, calling his project a "federal language", with competing forces towards regularity on the one hand and innovation on the other.

Austin suggests that the contradictions of Noah Webster's lexicography were part of a larger play between liberty and order within American intellectual discourse, with some pulled toward Europe and the past, and others pulled toward America and the new future.

Noah Webster viewed language as a means to control disruptive thoughts.

Noah Webster released his own edition of the Bible in 1833, called the Common Version.

Noah Webster used the King James Version as a base and consulted the Hebrew and Greek along with various other versions and commentaries.

Noah Webster molded the KJV to correct grammar, replaced words that were no longer used, and removed words and phrases that could be seen as offensive.

In 1832, Noah Webster wrote and published a history textbook titled History of the United States, which omitted any reference to the role of slavery in American history and included racist characterizations of African Americans.

Noah Webster played a critical role lobbying individual states throughout the country during the 1780s to pass the first American copyright laws, which were expected to have distinct nationalistic implications for the young nation.