Building a Nation With a Dictionary

BOSTON —  On June 4, 1800, Noah Webster announced his plan to compile a “Dictionary of the American Language.” A popular grammarian and persuasive political pamphleteer, Webster hoped to solve a vexing problem facing the new nation: Americans lacked a national language.

The French spoke French, the Germans German, but Americans, to the extent they shared a language at all, spoke English, the language of the despised mother country. As one commentator put it in 1787, “In most cases, a national language answers the purpose of distinction: But we have the misfortune of speaking the same language with a nation, who, of all people in Europe, have given, and continue to give us fewest proofs of love.”

Webster believed he had a solution: By compiling a dictionary of the “American language,” he hoped to demonstrate that Americans did, indeed, speak a language of their own, one that both distanced them from England, and bound them to one another. As Webster said, “A national language is a national tie, and what country wants it more than America?”

Webster’s announcement did not go unnoticed, though it might have been better for him if it had. Within a week, the Philadelphia Aurora called Webster ridiculous and his motives mercenary. The next day, June 10, “An Enemy to Innovation” grumbled in the Gazette of the United States, “If, as Mr. Webster asserts, it is true that many new words have already crept into the language of the United States, he would be much better employed in rooting out those anxious weeds, than in mingling them with the flowers.”

Webster might have appreciated the metaphor, if not the sentiment. At home in New Haven, he was busy tending his garden. Meanwhile, the attacks continued. On June 12, Joseph Dennie, editor of the Gazette, printed a pile of mocking, fictitious mail for the Connecticut lexicographer:

Sur, I find you are after meaking a nue Merrykin Dikshunary; your rite, Sir; for ofter lookin all over the anglish Books, you wont find a bit of SHILLALY big enuf to beat a dog wid.

Pat O’Dogerty

As I find der ish no DONDER and BLIXSUM in de English Dikshonere I hope you put both in yours.

Hans Bubbleblower

Mistur Webstur please to let me know whether you buy words by the hundred or by the dozen, &c; your price, I unclose your a certificat from my husband of my billyties.

Martha O’Gabble

I hereby certify that my wife martha has the best knack at coining new words of any I ever knew--& with the aid of a comforting drop she’ll fill you two dictonerys in an hour if you please.

Dermot O’Gabble

But O’Dogerty and the others were so many bugbears. Webster despised foreigners: “The country would be as prosperous and much more happy if no European should set his foot on our shores,” he once declared. He had no intention of codifying what he considered un-American “vulgarisms.” In 1806, when Webster published his first dictionary, “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,” he passed over donner, blitzen, shillelagh and the African-derived banjo, but did include opossum and hominy (both of American Indian origin), as well as neologisms like lengthy and Americanisms like federal, caucus and Congress.

In 1800, when Webster announced his plan to compile a dictionary, one out of every four people living in the United States did not speak English as a first language. Yet, Webster insisted the “American language” be derived from English and predicted that “all others will gradually waste away--and within a century and a half, North America will be peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language.”

In this, at least, Webster was wrong. Other languages have thrived in the United States, though, today, only one out of six Americans does not speak English as a native tongue, a lower percentage than in Webster’s day. In their daily speech, Americans today use hundreds of words Webster and his critics would have considered barbarisms, words by which immigrants like the lampooned O’Dogerty and Bubbleblower have greatly enriched American English.

Webster also predicted that, over time, the “American language” would become “as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German.” Here, too, he was wrong. But, in expecting that Americans would come to cherish their national idiom, Webster was more right than he could know.

By the time Webster published his 70,000-word “American Dictionary of the English Language” in 1828, his critics had long since conceded the existence of a distinctive American language--and had begun to celebrate it as a source of national pride. Already by 1820, Edward Everett wondered “whether one might not rather suppose that America were the native country of the language, and England a remote colony?” In 1829, James Fenimore Cooper boasted, “We speak our language, as a nation, better than any other people speak their language.”

If Everett and Cooper celebrated the purity of American English, later commentators would come to celebrate its folksiness. “I can speak English, as in this sentence,” H.L. Mencken once slyly demonstrated, “or I can talk American, as in this one here.”

Webster’s American Dictionary would become our nation’s dictionary, a national treasure and the founding document for the American English that has become the global language. But it’s worth remembering that Webster’s dictionary is also a testament to early America’s passionate nativist prejudices, a record of how Webster rooted out words he considered weedy. *