Gary Timm, age 12, of Brookfield, Wis.,, for his question:
How did Noah Webster make his first dictionary?
A proper dictionary shows how to spell and pronounce: a word and also gives its origin and correct meaning. It will answer your question about a word and add a few interesting facts that you did not expect. Noah webster is one of the men to thank for this reliable mine of information.
Noah Webster was a New Englander who fought in the War of Independence. He was a patient and thoughtful scholar, and his famous dictionary is an outcome of this side of his nature. But he also led an active life, contributing years of work to establish the sound ideas of our young country in the courts and in government and education.
For a while he was a school teacher, and it was then perhaps that the idea for his great dictionary was born. He listed the words that his pupils found difficult and added notes to help them spell and understand them. The list became a little book and remained popular for a century. This schoolbook was, of course, Noah Websterfs very first dictionary.
As our young country grew it became an individual with American customs and an american way of life. Early in the 1800s Noah webster, Ben Franklin, James Madison and others saw american changes occurring in the english language. The standard dictionaries of Walker and Samuel Johnson then used in england would not do. An American dictionary was needed for english speaking Americans.
The tremendous task was done by Noah Webster, the patient scholar. It was started in 1807 and took 20 years to complete. Webster spent 10 years studying english, its debt to other languages and how it had grown by coining, borrowing, changing and adapting words. He visited and talked with scholars in England and France and studied all the dictionaries then in existence.
These Sound studies gave him a basic word list. To it he added all the written and spoken words that he could gather. He combed the speech and writing of his day and added notes to explain how each word was used and spoken by Americans. This listing took seven years. In 1828 webster's American Dictionary of the english Language was published. It filled two volumes, and no dictionary in the world could compare with it.
Webstsr listed some 70,000 items and added to each item all the different and subtle meanings he could gather. He also streamlined our Spelling of such words as labor, color, theater and center. His great work offered the English Speaking peoples 12,000 more items and 40,000 more definitions than there were in any other dictionaries of the day.