Noah Webster

Noah Webster is justly considered a polymath for his contributions to a staggering range of fields, including educational reform, antislavery advocacy, epidemiology, journalism, and copyright law. Yet he is primarily remembered as the lexicographer of the American Dictionary of the English Language
(1828), whose legacy lives on in today’s Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Webster’s American Dictionary surpassed Samuel Johnson’s groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755) by docu- menting words, idioms, and pronunciations that were unique to the United States. He standardized the simplified spellings that still differentiate American English from British English, dropping the “u” from “colour,” for example.

Webster considered the founding of the United States an opportunity for reinvention. “Now is the time and this the country in which we may expect success in attempting changes to language, science, and government,” he wrote in 1789. “Let us then seize the present moment and establish a national language as well as a national government.”