History of Merriam Websters Dictionary
Noah Webster and America's First Dictionary
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758, Noah Webster came of age during the American Revolution and was a strong advocate of the Constitutional Convention. He believed fervently in the developing cultural independence of the United States, a chief part of which was to be a distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation, and style.
In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. Immediately thereafter he went to work on his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, for which he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, in order to research the origins of his own country's tongue. This book, published in 1828, embodied a new standard of lexicography; it was a dictionary with 70,000 entries that was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well.
One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen梩he latter of which he argued was "the old and true spelling" and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)
While Webster was promoting his dictionary, George and Charles Merriam opened a printing and bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1831. G. & C. Merriam Co. (renamed Merriam-Webster Inc. in 1982) inherited the Webster legacy when the Merriam brothers bought the unsold copies of the 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged from Webster's heirs after the great man's death in 1843. At the same time they secured the rights to create revised editions of that work. It was the beginning of a publishing tradition that has continued uninterrupted to this day at Merriam-Webster.
Further information on the birthplace and life of Noah Webster is available at the Noah Webster House/Museum of West Hartford History.
More Than Just Webster
The end of the 19th century brought G. & C. Merriam Company copyright and trademark difficulties created by the expiration of early copyrights on Webster's work, the sale of rights to some of his abridged dictionaries, and the expiration in 1889 of the copyright on Merriam-Webster's 1847 edition. The respect that Merriam-Webster had earned for its Webster's dictionaries over the course of fifty years was a desirable asset that unscrupulous companies found they could exploit simply by calling any dictionary they produced or reprinted Webster's.
Merriam-Webster went to court time and again over copyrights and trademarks. One famous suit, lodged against the Saalfield Publishing Company in 1917, resulted in an injunction enjoining that company from using the title Webster's Dictionary without the disclaimer, "This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of Webster's Dictionary, or by their successors." Later suits allowed the use of the name Webster by others, while upholding other marks identifying Merriam-Webster titles.
The net effect of the proliferation of Webster's dictionaries is a reference-book marketplace in which the consumer is either unaware of or confused about what differentiates these books. In an attempt to draw consumers' attention to the issue, the company changed its name in 1982 from G. & C. Merriam Company to Merriam-Webster Inc. and in 1991 reinforced that move by introducing the following position statement to further identify and distinguish its products and to place greater emphasis on a unique tradition of quality dictionary-making:
Not just Webster. Merriam-Webster.?/p>
Other publishers may use the name Webster, but only Merriam-Webster products are backed by 150 years of accumulated knowledge and experience. The Merriam-Webster name is your assurance that a reference work carries the quality and authority of a company that has been publishing since 1831.
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