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This week I listened to a podcast about a criminally insane man who played a big part in the formation of the Oxford English Dictionary. But as I was reading more about that dictionary, I was led in down a side path and ended up reading about a Noah Webster, a Connecticut native who is considered the father of American education (my guess is that he’d be horrified by the current state of our public education system, but that’s neither here nor there).

His professional career got off to a rocky start after attending Yale during the Revolutionary War (and college didn’t go smoothly either – he quit for a year after lapsing into a depression but found his way back on track after finding a mentor). He passed the bar exam but couldn’t find work as an lawyer due to the war so he opened a school which was immediately successful, but then he quickly shut it down and left town, likely due to a failed romance.

Webster then turned to writing, where he wrote a series of popular newspaper articles and then his first versions of his famous Speller, Grammar and Reader books for elementary education. These books were designed to teach reading in elementary school and were quite successful. The Speller book was known as the Blue-Backed Speller due to it’s blue cover, and would see 385 editions in Webster’s lifetime, sell over 60 million copies, and be a dominant force in reading education for over 100 years. Over the course of all these editions, Webster changed the spelling of many words to make them “Americanized.” This was somewhat arbitrarily, but clearly growing up as a patriot during the revolution gave him the desire to distance even the language from British rule.

Of course, Webster is probably most famous for his dictionary, but these weren’t successful in his lifetime. He published his first dictionary in 1806 and then  much more comprehensive version in 1825, but it only sold 2,500 copies. He finished his second edition in 1843 and then died soon afterwards. After his death his dictionary rapidly grew in popularity and influence.

One statistic in particular stood out to me about Webster’s life – he was such a prolific writer that a modern bibliography of his published works required 655 pages! He would have been quite the blogger…

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