Noah Webster

In his early years, he was a fervent Congregationalist who believed that the whole nation should be ‘Christianized’.

He passed away on May 28, 1843 and is buried at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.

Noah Webster, Jr. was born on October 16, 1758 to Noah Sr. and Mercy, in New Hartford, Connecticut.

At the age of six, he attended a run-down primary school, which he dreaded. It was these experiences in primary school that incited him to improve the education system in America, for the future.

He studied Latin and Greek from his church pastor during his preparations to enter Yale College at the age of 14. He joined the university and then served the Connecticut Militia during the American Revolutionary War.

After he graduated from Yale, he was unsure of what career to pursue. He taught at a local school for a brief period of time, but he soon realized that the pay was very less and he needed a drastic career change. Thus, he studied law under Oliver Elisworth, while maintaining a full-time teaching job at Hartford.

Despite finding his schedule extremely taxing, he passed his bar examination in 1781.

After a few failed romances and due to the widespread unemployment owing to the ongoing Revolutionary War, he turned to bookish work and founded a private school in Goshen, New York.

He wrote his first ‘speller’ and grammar publication in 1783 titled, ‘A Grammatical Institute of the English Language’. He created this publication to deliver an academic footing for American jingoism. The book went on to earn the nickname, ‘Blue-Blacked Speller’.

In 1787, he wrote a leaflet under an alias titled ‘An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution Proposed by the Late Convention Held at Philadelphia’.

In 1791, he helped found the ‘Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery’. Two years later, he moved to New York City to edit the ‘Federalist Party’ newspaper at $1500.

In 1793, he founded the first ‘daily’ in New York titled, ‘American Minerva’, which later came to be known as ‘Commercial Advertiser’.

His magnum opus, ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language’, which took twenty eight years to complete, was finally published in 1828. The book was published in two volumes, which included 70,000 entries and became a model in the world of lexicography.

The book sold quickly and went on to spawn three more editions from 1841 to 1845. It became so popular that many people believed that it exceeded Samuel Johnson’s 1755 British lexicon masterwork. It is also considered his major work, because he learnt 26 languages including Sanskrit and Anglo-Saxon, to complete his work.