Reading Joshua Kendall’s smart new biography of the pioneering lexicographer Noah Webster Jr. (1758-1843 ... of 1775 -- it included 70,000 words, all defined with a “purely American flavor ...

he added new words like skunk and squash. The book wasn’t the big-seller that the Blue-Backed Speller had been. Webster had to mortgage his house to produce a second volume. Noah Webster died on ...

The brothers, learned much from the business failures of their West Brookfield elders, proposed a revision and enlargement of Webster’s works to sell for $6. The Websters thought it was ...

People often introduce a definition of a word by saying, “Webster says . . . “ The truth is, Noah Webster himself — the founder of American lexicography, or dictionary-making — hasn’t ...

DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: In reading a short biography of Noah Webster, I was impressed by the number of languages he learned (27?) in order to trace the etymology of the words in his dictionaries.

The lexicographer was pen pals with Founding Fathers John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and the new nation’s greatest swordsman, George Washington. Webster has been dubbed "The ...

A man named Noah ... Webster believed that Americans should have their own textbooks rather than rely on English books. He created a speller that taught students to read, spell and pronounce words ...

They spelled words like flavour ... Forcing English into a Latin template led to sentences that felt artificial. Noah Webster, in many ways the father of American English, rejected these rules.

Those differences can be largely attributed to Merriam Webster founder Noah Webster ... include the letter U in words like "flavour" and "colour" while Americans write "flavor" and "color." ...

Happy Dictionary Day, word-nerds! This is the official holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Noah Webster, who would be 254 years old if he were still living and breathing on this planet.