Webster, Worcester and the Dictionary Wars, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. So in our episode on Nicks
Versus Headen, we mentioned that there was an intense rivalry
between Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Wooster and their dictionaries,
which came to be known as the Dictionary Wars. I
don't remember if I described it exactly as a rivalry

(00:34):
in that episode. If I did, I kind of wish
that wasn't the word that I had chosen, because now
having researched it more, I don't think that's the best descriptor.
I said. There might be a future episode on it, though,
And here it is. This grew into a two parter,
and it's kind of tangled because Wooster and Webster, they
each had their own lives. The Dictionary Wars went on

(00:58):
long after Webster's death, whether Wooster wanted them to or not.
So in this what I decided to do, rather than
trying to lay out this whole thing strictly in chronological order,
We're going to have part one today's episode more about
these two men's biographies, and then Part two is more

(01:21):
detail about these dictionary wars. And as a note upfront,
a whole lot of the writing about the dictionary wars
differentiates among all these different editions of the dictionaries in question,
mainly by talking about the formats they were printed in,
using terms like octavo and quarto, So if you're not

(01:43):
familiar with that terminology, it comes from how books were printed.
So in a folio there would be one piece of
paper folded in half that would create four total pages
of a book, and then in a quarto the paper
was folded twice made eight pages, and then in octavo
threefolds made sixteen pages, and then it just goes on
from there. And in terms of the height of the
finished books, the folios are the tallest. Each successive size

(02:07):
is smaller than the last one, so like the folios
are big, hefty books, and a quarto would be like
much smaller. This is a totally reasonable way to talk
about these books. They were advertised that way at the time.
To some extent, these words are still around. I think
they come up most often talking about things like Shakespeare's
first folio and things like that. But this is just

(02:27):
not how books are printed anymore. In the context of
an audio podcast, that seems a little unwieldy, especially since
we know a lot of people listen to podcasts while
they're doing something else. So I'm sort of imagining somebody
in the middle of doing their dishes and going, wait,
which one was the quarto? What is a quarto?

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Again?

Speaker 2 (02:46):
So, if you're really familiar with all this or it's
connected to your field in this in some way, and
you're listening and you're like, why aren't they just calling
this the quarto, that's why. So because he was the
older of the two men and he started publishing first,
we're going to start with Noah Webster Junior. He has
also gotten significantly more attention from historians and biographers than

(03:10):
Wooster has, so his part of today's episode is going
to be longer than Worcester's. Webster was born on October sixteenth,
seventeen fifty eight, in the West Division of Hartford, Connecticut
that's now just West Hartford. His parents were Noah Webster
Senior and Mercy Steele Webster, and he was one of
their five children. When Webster started studying at Yale College,

(03:32):
it only had about one hundred and fifty students and
two professors. He took a brief break from studying there
to fight in the Revolutionary War, and then he graduated
in seventeen seventy eight. He wanted to study law, but
his family really couldn't afford to send him to law school,
so he became a teacher and studied law on his own.
He was admitted to the bar in seventeen eighty one,

(03:55):
but turned out he couldn't really make enough money as
a lawyer, so he turned his attention to something that
he thought was sorely needed, and that was schoolbooks for
children that were written in the United States by an
American rather than being imported from Britain. This was during
a time when there was a lot of debate in

(04:15):
the United States about language and literature. Some people, including
Thomas Jefferson, thought that as an independent nation, the United
States should be freed from the linguistic and literary expectations
of British English and should have a language and a
literary canon of its own. A lot of other prominent
figures thought the same, although this was not at all universal.

(04:37):
There were also people who thought North American slang and
pronunciations were vulgar and were not only ruining the English language,
but were also reinforcing stereotypes of Americans as coarse and ignorant,
and the battle continues today. It never ever ended. For
Webster and for others, this wasn't just about creating a

(04:59):
national identity for the United States. It was also connected
to the idea that a democracy could only flourish if
its citizens were educated, and that education required high quality
textbooks that did not, for example, include a bunch of
stuff about loyalty to the crown, which was common in
a lot of the imported textbooks, and Webster's words quote,

(05:22):
I have too much pride not to wish to see
America assume a national character. I have too much pride
to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to teach
our children the alphabet. Webster's first foray into all this
was the American Spelling Book, that was in seventeen eighty three,
the same year that the Revolutionary War ended. He was

(05:45):
inspired by a new Guide to the English Tongue in
five Parts by English cleric Thomas Dilworth, which was widely
used in the United States, even though it was clearly
written for British children and had some odd pronunciation rules.
Webster used this book as his starting point adapting it
for American use, and at some point afterward someone writing

(06:07):
under the name Dilworth's Ghosts accused him of plagiarizing it.
In seventeen eighty four, Webster published A Grammar and then
A Reader in seventeen eighty five. Together with the Speller,
they formed a Grammatical Institute of the English Language, comprising
an easy, concise, and systematic method of education designed for

(06:28):
the use of English schools in America. I didn't read
out the commas, but they're kind of sprinkled through there,
just a casual comma, do.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
We need another? Yes?

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Some of them seem extraneous. This became an immensely popular
work and was widely used until about nineteen hundred, selling
roughly seventy million copies. In addition to writing books that
he hoped would prepare children to be an active part
of a healthy democracy, Webster was writing about democracy itself.

(07:00):
His seventeen eighty five Sketches of American Policy advocated for,
among other things, a constitution that would end slavery and
institute a universal education program. Webster was very politically active
and was a big part of trying to establish a
culture in the early United States, and he was well
connected to people like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin,

(07:24):
so he is sometimes described as a forgotten founder. As
soon as his first Speller was published, Webster also started
advocating for copyright laws. This was absolutely about protecting his
own interests. Who wasn't really motivated by having wider questions
about copyright law and what should be protected. At this point,

(07:47):
the basis of the US government was the Articles of Confederation,
which did not allow for the federal government to pass
a national copyright law. The Continental Congress had recommended that
the states each passed their own law, so Webster traveled
state to state and wrote to legislators and states that
he could not personally visit. After the US Constitution was ratified,

(08:12):
taking effect in seventeen eighty nine, Webster also lobbied for
a federal copyright law, the first of which was passed
in seventeen ninety. So, in addition to being described as
a forgotten founder, Webster is sometimes also called the father
of American copyright law, as he was working on that.
In seventeen eighty seven, Webster founded American magazine in New

(08:36):
York City, and then in seventeen eighty nine, when he
was thirty one and she was twenty three, he got
married to Rebecca Greenleaf. At first, she turned down his proposal,
but he wrote her a letter and sent it along
with a lock of his hair, saying quote, without you,
the world is all alike to me, and with you,
any part will be agreeable as a pledge of my sincerity,

(08:59):
except a lack of hair, and keep it no longer
than I deserve to be remembered. You must go, and
I must be separated from all that is dear to me,
but you will be attended by guardian angels and the
best wishes of your sincere and respectful admirer. They eventually
had six daughters and one son together, along with another

(09:19):
son who died while he was still a baby. So
I think that letter is pretty sweet and romantic. Definitely
intended to be so. But Webster did not have a
professional reputation as a sweetheart. He was described as extremely opinionated, combative,
hard to get along with, and rude. He also had

(09:40):
some controversial opinions. We'll be getting to some of them,
and that those opinions combined with his demeanor to earn
him a lot of detractors. He was also fond of
publishing anonymous pieces that either praised his own work or
attacked his critics. A little later in his life, he
also had an intense religious experience and became a devout

(10:03):
Calvinist and a born again Christian. And then after that
a lot of people found his work to be excessively
moralizing than his opinions to be increasingly conservative. Beyond that,
he also experienced depression and anxiety for a lot of
his life, and he referenced that often in his journals.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
The same year he married Rebecca Greenleaf, Webster wrote Dissertations
on the English Language with Notes historical and critical, to
which is added by way of appendix, an essay on
a Reformed mode of Spelling, with doctor Franklin's arguments on
that subject. Similar to earlier, a lot of uh, just
kind of commas floating through there. It was dedicated to

(10:45):
Benjamin Franklin, and in it he argued for American English
to be separated from the English of Britain. This included
calling for reforms to how English was spelled. This set
in part quote, now is the time and this is
the country and which we may expect success in attempting
changes to language, science, and government. Delay in the plan

(11:09):
here proposed may be fatal. Under a tranquil general government,
the minds of men may again sink into indolence, A
national acquiescence in error will follow, and posterity be doomed
to struggle with difficulties which time and accident will perpetually multiply.
Let us then seize the present moment and establish a

(11:32):
national language as well as a national government. Along with
other changes, Webster argued that all superfluous or silent letters
should be omitted, so that, for example, the word bread
meaning the food would be spelled just b r ed
get rid of that extra A, and the word give
would have no silent e on the end. Letters that

(11:55):
had indefinite sounds should also be replaced, so grief would
become gr e, f daughter would become dawt er, and
chorus would become ko r us like a whole phonetic situation.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah. In seventeen ninety, Webster published a collection of Essays
and fugitive Writings by Noah Webster. This was written using
his proposed spelling reforms, so in that title Fugitive does
not have an E on the end. This book was
quote designed to aid the principles of the revolution, to

(12:32):
suppress political discord, and to diffuse a spirit of inquiry
favorable to morals, science, and truth.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
The preface begins quote The following collection consists of essays
and fugitive pieces written at various times and on different occasions,
as will appear by their dates and subjects. So Fugitive
repeats that spelling that Tracy just mentioned. Pieces is pee
ces written, doesn't have its initial W, as is spelled

(13:03):
with a Z instead of an S, will has only
one L, and a peer is spelled appe er. Although
I would make the case there's an extra P there
by his rules.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Now I'm like, did I accidentally No, I copied and that,
so I'm pretty sure, pretty sure that second P was
really there. The whole thing is like that, there's a
lot about English spelling that really does not make sense,
and this document did mostly spell words according to how

(13:38):
they sound. But it will probably come as no surprise
that a whole lot of people really made fun of
this book and Webster lost a lot of money on it.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
So we're going to talk about some of his less
laughable but still controversial work. After a sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
In seventeen ninety three, Noah Webster founded two federalist newspapers,
the American Minerva and The Herald. He sold them both
in eighteen oh three. Before that, seventeen ninety five, he
published a call for physicians to send him all of
their thoughts on yellow fever. That's a disease that had

(14:22):
caused a horrific epidemic in Philadelphia two years before and
had also caused major outbreaks in other cities as well.
Perhaps because he had already established a name for himself
as a cantankerous man with weird opinions about spelling, he
got a lot of criticism from the medical establishment for

(14:43):
basically being a dilettante who was sticking his nose into
stuff that he could not possibly understand. He did not
give up, though, and in seventeen ninety six published a
collection of papers on the subject of Billious Fevers, which
was essentially a compendium of everything that known or believed
about yellow fever at the time. This was followed by

(15:04):
these seventeen ninety nine, A Brief History of Epidemic and
Pestilential diseases with the principal phenomena of the physical world
which precede and accompany them, and observations deduced from the facts.
Stated in two volumes totaling roughly seven hundred pages, all
of those spelled the way we would anticipate. Yes, However,

(15:26):
it does say that it's a brief work. When it's
seven hundred pages spread across two volume.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Lies were told. This became a standard medical text, basically
a chronological resource detailing as many epidemics and disease outbreaks
as Webster could find information on.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
I mean, both of these had genuine value. We're talking
about a time when there is no Google. Everyone does
not have access to a medical library nearby. It was
like everything that was known in one place that people
could have on hand. Of Webster's efforts were particularly lucrative,

(16:03):
though except the speller. The Speller did pretty well. He
had a pretty big family, and that meant that their
living expenses were high, So the Websters moved from place
to places. They just tried to make ends meet. For
a time, they lived in Amherst, where Webster helped found
Amherst Academy and Amherst College in seventeen ninety eight, they

(16:24):
moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where they got a good
deal on a house because it had previously belonged to
Benedict Arnold. In eighteen hundred, Noah Webster Junior announced his
plan to write a dictionary, specifically an American dictionary. He
wanted it to follow the spelling reforms he advocated and
include words that had been added to the English language

(16:46):
in the United States. Its quotations and examples would come
from American sources, not British ones. Naturally, he got a
lot of criticism for this, for all of the reasons
that we have already discussed. Yeah, there were certainly people
who thought, yes, we need an American dictionary, but a
lot of people who thought that Noah Webster should not

(17:06):
be the person to do it. A lot of people
today write about Webster is having been a huge part
of creating a national identity for the United States. Through
this and other dictionaries and his other writing and other activities,
he repeatedly wrote about how creating a common national language would,

(17:29):
in his opinion, form the foundation of a national unity,
and his selections of American works for quotations and examples
in these dictionaries like that was reinforcing the idea that
the United States had its own literary canon, and that
canon had value. The US did not need to just
rely on works from Britain. But there's another way to

(17:52):
look at this as well. In a twenty fourteen essay
in William and Mary Quarterly, doctor Tim Cassidy frames this
as more about Webster uniting people in their hatred of
him quote. Webster did indeed play a role in forging
American national sentiment, but not because his ideas were popular, representative,
or accepted. Rather, by holding or seeming to hold very

(18:16):
unpopular positions about American language, Webster unintentionally catalyzed a large
media phenomenon in which other writers hastened to counter his
ideas with their own. Yeah, there were a lot, a
lot of other schoolbooks and dictionaries and things like that
during this era. He was not at all the only one.
So Webster published his compendious Dictionary of the English Language

(18:40):
in eighteen oh six. This was not the first English
dictionary written or published in the United States, and it
also was not the first dictionary to include words that
had been coined in North America. But this eighteen oh
six dictionary is often described as the first fairly comprehensive
dictionary of American English. It contained more than forty thousand words.

(19:04):
Webster did include some spelling changes, but these changes really
were not as radical as his essays and fugitive writings
had shown. This that he'd earlier called for. A few
words do stand out, though, such as women spelled wimmn.

(19:25):
He insisted this was the quote primitive and correct orthography.
He also claimed to have added five thousand new words
of American origin, although this included things like proper names
and adjective forms of words that had only been defined
as nouns in British dictionaries. Many of the new words
he included had roots in Algonquian languages, including skunk, moose, moccasin,

(19:50):
and squash. There were words that came from European languages
as well, including chowder, which likely came from French via
the maritime provinces of Canada in New England, cookie which
came from Dutch, and cafeteria, which came from Spanish via Mexico.
Although this is recognized as a noteworthy book, it was

(20:11):
met with a lot of criticism. It was not reviewed
particularly well. Eventually, Lyman Cobb, a young school teacher from
New York, became one of Webster's most vocal critics, not
just about this dictionary, but about his other work as well.
Cobb started publishing his own competing spellers and dictionaries and

(20:32):
other resources, in part because he thought Webster's were so bad.
Cobb's first Speller came out in eighteen twenty one, when
he was only twenty one, and a revised version followed
four years later. He also started publishing criticisms of Webster
in newspapers in eighteen twenty seven, and in eighteen thirty
one he collected all these many many pieces into a

(20:56):
critical review of the Orthography of Doctor Webster series of books.
Among other things, Cob pointed out that there were a
lot of discrepancies and inconsistencies among Webster's various books, like
different spellers or editions of the Dictionary contained different spellings
for the same words, or a word might be spelled
one way in its own entry in the dictionary, but

(21:19):
then spelled differently when it was used in definitions of
other words. Webster spent a lot of time publishing rebuttals
of Cobb's criticisms, as this was happening. Webster was also
working on another bigger dictionary. He finished it in January
of eighteen twenty five, after defining zimome or zinone as quote,

(21:39):
one of the constituents of gluten. On finishing this dictionary,
he wrote, quote, when I had come to the last word,
I was seized with a trembling, which made it somewhat
difficult to hold my pen steady for writing. This cause
seems to have been the thought that I might not
then live to finish the work, or the thought that
I was so near the end of my labors. But

(22:02):
I summoned strength to finish the last word, and then,
walking about the room a few minutes, I recovered.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
It took three years to get this new dictionary into print,
and the process was laborious. At first. Webster couldn't find
a publisher, and eventually his son in law, Professor Chauncey
Goodrich of Yale College, connected him to Sherman Converse. Converse
and Goodrich wanted to address some of the same inconsistencies

(22:30):
and errors that had already been pointed out with Webster's work,
so James Gates Percival was hired as editor. Perceval was
very conscientious and detail oriented, but Webster disagreed with a
lot of his proposed edits, describing them as pedantry. Eventually,
Webster got so fed up that he fired Perceval, with

(22:50):
part of the dictionary still unedited. This dictionary, titled American
Dictionary of the English Language, came out in eighteen twenty
eight and contained more than sixty five thousand words. It
also contained etymologies as well as usage examples that came
from the writing of people like George Washington and Washington Irving,

(23:10):
as well as the Christian Bible. Rather than using lots
of British literature, a lot of sources say, Webster learned
twenty six languages to research the etymologies in this dictionary.
This included brushing up on languages that he already knew,
like Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and German, as well as
getting some familiarity with other languages from Europe, the Middle East,

(23:33):
and Asia. But he wasn't exactly using all this study
to accurately research the origin of each word. He was
trying to prove that the biblical story of the Tower
of Babel was true and that all of humanity had
originally spoken the same language in the words of Scribner's
Dictionary of American History, third edition quote. This etymology won

(23:55):
almost no acceptance at the time and remains universally discredited.
After publishing this dictionary, Webster renewed his call for a broader,
stronger federal copyright law. Under the seventeen ninety Copyright Act
that he had advocated for, copyright protection lasted for fourteen years,

(24:16):
which he did not think was very long. It also
expired if the author died before the end of that time.
Webster was seventy, so he had reason to be concerned
that if he died, his family might lose control over
his work, and then might also lose any income they
could have earned from it after his death. There were

(24:38):
also some loopholes that didn't protect American authors from pirated
versions of their work that were published in Britain. As
this dictionary was being prepared for printing, Goodrich and Converse
looked for someone to create an abridged version, something that
would be smaller, less expensive, and even more mainstream. Webster

(24:59):
didn't really have the time or energy to do this himself,
and he had started working on another project. This was
a version of the Bible with reformed spelling and with
anything that Webster thought was dirty taken out. So Convers
just hired someone else to do it, and that person
was Joseph Emerson Wooster.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Wooster already had an excellent reputation as a lexicographer and
a researcher. He had previously abridged Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of
the English Language, which was first published in seventeen fifty
five and was still one of the most widely used
and respected English dictionaries. Based on his reputation and his experience,

(25:39):
Wooster seemed like the right person for the job, but
he was also pretty reluctant to take it on because
he was already working on a dictionary of his own. Eventually,
Wooster took the job, and his abridged version of Webster's
Dictionary came out in eighteen twenty nine.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Webster himself was outraged. Con and Goodrich had basically cut
him out of all the planning and decision making about
this abridgement, probably on purpose because they knew he would
disagree with a lot of their decisions. Webster was so
upset that he decided to sell the rights to the
abridged version Goodrich, who was married to Webster's daughter, Julia,

(26:18):
talked him into selling the rights to him, arguing that
the book should at least stay in the family.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Worcester later published that dictionary he'd been working on, the
one that had made him reluctant to work on Webster's abridgment,
and eventually Webster accused him of plagiarism in that dictionary.
We will be talking more about that next episode. After
this dispute with Worcester, Webster seems to have become increasingly

(26:46):
angry and unwell, more like an ongoing series of illnesses
and discomforts, not really any particular major illness. He kept
trying to promote his books, attack the work of his competitors,
and arguing against the influence of British dictionaries and literature
on American English.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Webster's family also became increasingly divided for reasons connected to
his work. Late in his life, he assigned the copyright
for his Speller to his son William, to the horror
of his daughters and sons in law. William had tried
his hand at a bunch of different business ventures that
never worked out, and he was continually being bailed out

(27:26):
by his father. The Speller was the most profitable book
that Webster ever published, so the family was worried that
William was going to squander away income that they were
all relying on. Divisions also arose around how Goodrich had
handled the abridgment and the plagiarism dispute with Worcester. Some
of the family kind of felt like he had taken

(27:47):
advantage of Webster in his old age. In eighteen forty one,
Webster published another version of his dictionary. The Son was
an American Dictionary of the English Language, corrected and enlarged.
He died in new Haven, Connecticut two years later on
May twenty eighth, eighteen forty three, reportedly holding a copy
of his Speller on his deathbed. He was buried in

(28:10):
Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. Today, Webster's dictionary
is under the name Merriam Webster. We're going to talk
a lot more about George and Charles Merriam in Part two.
They opened a printing and bookselling business in Springfield, Massachusetts
in eighteen thirty one, later buying unfinished copies of one

(28:30):
of Webster's dictionaries and eventually the rights to his work.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
G and C. Merriam Company became a subsidiary of Encyclopedia
Britannica in nineteen sixty four, and that subsidiary was renamed
Merriam Webster Incorporated in nineteen eighty two. After we come
back from a sponsor break, we will talk about Joseph
Emerson Worcester. Joseph Emerson Worcester was one of fifteen children

(29:04):
born to Jesse and Sarah Parker Worcester. He was born
in Bedford, New Hampshire, on August twenty fourth, seventeen eighty four.
The Worcesters were a farming family, and for a lot
of his young life Joseph worked on the farm. He
didn't have access to a lot of, like really good education,
so he did a lot of study on his own.

(29:25):
Joseph was twenty one when he entered preparatory school at
Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and he went on to
Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut four years later. He
graduated from Yale in eighteen eleven, the year he turned
twenty seven. In spite of the limits on their access
to education, nearly all of the Worcester siblings became teachers.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
For Joseph. This started in Salem, Massachusetts, possibly because he
had some family there. One of his students was Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and he became Hawthorne's tutor after he had to leave
school to recover from an injury.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Wooster was described as shy and methodical, and as patient
and kind with his students, but he also had very
high standards and he really loved doing research. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson described him as quote want to sit silent, literally
by the hour, a slumbering volcano of facts and statistics

(30:24):
while others talked.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
In addition to his work as a teacher, Wooster also
started writing books to use in schools. His A Geographical
Dictionary or Universal Gazetteer Ancient and Modern was published in
eighteen seventeen, followed by A Gazetteer of the United States
in eighteen eighteen. His Elements of Geography came out in
eighteen nineteen, and then Sketches of the Earth and Its

(30:49):
Inhabitants in eighteen twenty three. That same year he became
a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Then three years later, so eighteen twenty six, he published
Elements of History, Ancient and modern accompanied by an historical atlas,
and then outlines of scripture geography with an atlas. During

(31:10):
these years, Wooster also moved a couple of times from
Salem to Andover and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having written
six books on a range of subjects over the course
of a decade, including issuing revised editions that we did
not mention here, Wooster turned his attention to lexicography, or
the compilation of dictionaries and the principles and practices involved

(31:34):
with that compilation. As we mentioned earlier, he published an
abridgment of Samuel Johnson's seventeen fifty five Dictionary Needed that
in eighteen twenty eight, and then a year later he
was hired to create an abridged version of Webster's eighteen
twenty eight American Dictionary of the English Language. That abridgment
came out in eighteen twenty nine. Wooster put out his

(31:55):
own comprehensive, pronouncing an Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language
in eighteen thirty. This contained roughly the same number of
words as Webster's unabridged eighteen twenty eight dictionary, but as
a book it was shorter. It did not contain etymologies,
and his definitions tended to be a lot more concise.
That meant his dictionary was also less expensive than Webster's.

(32:19):
He also included what came to be known as the
compromise vowel, a sound in words like fast and dance
that was between the way a is pronounced in cat
or hat in the way it's pronounced in father. After
publishing this dictionary, Worcester went to Europe for several months
and collected resource materials on philology and lexicography. He got

(32:40):
back to the US in eighteen thirty one and started
working as editor for the American Almanac and Repository of
Useful Knowledge. This was an annual almanac that Worcester edited
until eighteen forty two. In eighteen thirty four, Webster accused
Wooster of plagiarism, claiming that Wooster had used material from

(33:01):
his abridgment of Webster's dictionary in his own work. This
was the start of the dictionary wars that we're going
to talk about in part two, But we'll go ahead
and note that Webster directed various people to comb through
Wooster's work looking for evidence against him, but they found nothing.
In eighteen thirty five, Worcester published his Elementary Dictionary of

(33:24):
the English Language that was shorter and simpler than his
comprehensive Pronouncing an Explanatory Dictionary, and it was meant to
be used in common schools. Like Worster's previous dictionary. This
was well reviewed and it sold well, and he was
able to move into a large set of rented rooms
in Cambridge, where one of his neighbors was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

(33:46):
I don't know if I ever want to do a
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow episode, but he sure has come up
a lot l He is like connective glue of American history,
I think. On November twenty eighth, eighteen forty one, Worster
Marian Amy Elizabeth McKean. He was fifty seven and she
was forty. He bought land and a house next to
the one where he had rented rooms. Amy's father was

(34:09):
a professor at Harvard, and she worked with Joseph on
his future writings. In eighteen forty six, Joseph Worcester published
his Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language. At
this point, Norah Webster was dead, he had died three
years previously, and Wooster's preface to this dictionary included a
note that none of its spellings or definitions had come

(34:33):
from Webster. He also, in that material cited Webster as
one of his sources for pronunciations, alongside British sources like
Webster is cited in the text of the dictionary, and
he praised Webster as a quote distinguished American lexicographer. As

(34:54):
this dictionary was going to print, Wooster was having trouble
with this site. Sometimes this is described as resulting from cataracts.
He had a series of surgeries after which he was
blind in his right eye and had partial sight in
his left. During his surgeries and recovery, he was really
not paying attention to what was going on in the news,
so some years passed before he learned that a huge

(35:17):
controversy had unfolded in the press, including a scathing review
of his work, apparently written at the behest of Webster's publishers.
Worcester also discovered that a publisher in London had put
out an edition of his own Universal and Critical Dictionary
of the English Language that said on its title page

(35:38):
that it was compiled from work by Noah Webster.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
It was not. This was Worcester's own dictionary. This fueled
additional speculation that Wooster's work was suspect in some way,
even though he had never personally had any contact with
this London publisher and just had nothing to do with
this publisher's franklin inexplicable actions. This is also something we're

(36:03):
going to be talking about a lot more on Wednesday.
But Worcester found all of this just enormously upsetting. In
eighteen fifty five, Worcester published a pronouncing, explanatory and synonymous
Dictionary of the English Language. As its name suggests, this
one included synonyms, and it also included etymologies. Then in

(36:23):
eighteen sixty he published a four volume Dictionary of the
English Language. Joseph Emerson Worcester died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
October twenty seventh, eighteen sixty five. At that point he
had been working on annotations for a future version of
that four volume dictionary. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery,

(36:44):
which is also in Cambridge. Today, Noah Webster's name is
almost synonymous with the word dictionary. While people may not
have heard of Joseph Emerson Worcester at all, but during
his lifetime. Worcester's dictionaries were really well respected. Sometimes he's
described as wanting to preserve British pronunciations and usage, but
that's only somewhat true. He did use British sources in

(37:08):
his work, but he used American ones as well, and
he defaulted to British standards when there just wasn't really
a clear consensus. While Webster had been calling for spelling
reform and a replacement of British sources with American ones
and including words coined in the US that had not
become widely used, Wooster had been carefully creating well researched

(37:28):
dictionaries that focused on clarity and accuracy and quote the
prevailing and best usage of this country. Consequently, there were
a lot of institutions that preferred Worcester's dictionaries, including Harvard
and the University of Virginia, and he had a lot
of support. Amongst the very outspoken writers and speakers, one

(37:49):
was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said at one point, quote
mister Wooster's dictionary, on which, as is well known, the
literary men of this metropolis are, by special statute allowed
to be sworn in place of the Bible. I think
that's a joke, but I still like it. Author and
minister Edward Everett Hale also remarked that the only two

(38:12):
books that would be needed to establish a new civilization
would be Shakespeare and Wooster's eighteen sixty Dictionary. So it makes.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Sense that Webster and later Charles and George Merriam had
seen Wooster and his work as a threat, and that
was a big part of the Dictionary wars. And we're
going to talk all about that next time.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah. I know it's a little weird to kind of
have two parts of two different biographies and then a
selection of their work, But it also would have been
weird to like try to interweave it together, and that way,
I feel like would have been confusing.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, I think it makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Thank you. I have some listener mail. It is from Caitlin.
The title of this email is John Nix and his
Four Sons, and Caitlyn wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly. One
detail of Wednesday's Nicks versus head in episode caught in
my brain immediately John Nix's four sons and their shared

(39:08):
middle initial of W. I had to know if they
shared the same name. I started digging into genealogical records
and found John Junior in a notable New Yorker's eighteen
ninety six to eighteen ninety nine, listed with the middle
name William. John Senior died in eighteen ninety five, very
helpful to avoid generational confusion there. John was the only

(39:29):
Nixon that edition, though onward went the quest. An article
in Brooklyn Life from the seventeenth anniversary of the company
notes quote a rather singular fact relating to the fore
men who constitute the firm is that the middle initial
of each is W, which I find hilarious worth commenting on,

(39:50):
but not worth saying what it initializes. Using John Senior's
death year, I found an obituary that mentioned his birth year,
which was enough information to find someone on ancestry who
had traced that branch of the family tree. So John William,
George Washington, Frank Wesley, and Robert Williamson. There seemed to
be several other siblings, including a brother, Harry w between

(40:13):
George and Frank in age. Harry disappears between the eighteen
seventy and eighteen eighty censuses, and there's a burial record
for someone of that name and birth year for eighteen
seventy three. So not only is each w a different name,
but not a single Willard in the bunch, unless maybe
Harry an answer to a question that has zero impact
to the story being told, but which was satisfying to

(40:35):
hunt down anyway, Caitlyn. Okay, thank you Caitlyn so much.
This is literally the exact kind of rabbit hole I
will go down and have been known to go down
in the course of researching this show. But it was
not a rabbit hole I had time for this time.

(40:56):
It was it was an episode that was like, get
it going, got get a move on, stop wasting time.
So thank you so much Caitlin for doing that and
allowing me the pleasure of following following along with that,
with that journey, I think I think they've written to
us before. I'm pretty sure Caitlyn's name is jumping out

(41:17):
to me as familiar. So thank you so much, Caitlin.
Thank you for this email, Thank you for doing all
of that digging. Maybe at some point I will find
some other weird question that I actually do have time
to jump down a rabbit hole about. If you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or a history podcast atiheartradio dot com or
on social media ad Missed in History That's for You'll

(41:39):
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever
else you'd like to take your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
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(42:00):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Webster, Worcester and the Dictionary Wars, Part 1