Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in West Hartford, Connecticut.  Webster's family was supported by his father, who worked as a farmer and a weaver.  His mother worked at home, taking care of Noah and his four siblings.  Noah,Charles, and Abraham helped their father with the farm work, while his sisters, Mercy and Jerusha, worked with their mother to keep house and make food and clothing for the family.

    In Webster‚s time few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale.  At the time Yale was Connecticut's only college.  He left for New Haven in 1774, when he was 16. Webster's years at Yale coincided with the Revolutionary War.  Because New Haven had food shortages during this time, many of Noah's classes were held in Glastonbury.  In one of Webster‚s reminiscences, he recalls the shortages through which he suffered while at Yale:

Œ"So impoverished was the country at one time," he writes, "that the steward of the college could not    supply the necessary provisions of the table, and the students were compelled to return to spend several months at home.  At one time goods were so scarce that the farmers cut corn-stalks and crushed them in cider-mills, and then boiled the juice down to a syrup as a substitute for sugar."‚ (Scudder 8) *

    Webster endured these hardships however and graduated in 1778.  Originally intending to study law after his days at Yale, Webster found instead that he would need to earn some money before he could pay for more schooling.  He began teaching in Hartford after his graduation.

    At the time, American schools were ill-equipped to handle the numbers of children who were trying to get an education.  Untrained teachers were often forced to teach in crowded classrooms with no desks, poor supplies, and unsatisfactory texts.  The texts that students did have available to them all came from England.  These conditions, and a desire to have American children learn from American books, led Webster to write his own textbook in 1783.  He called his text A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, but it soon became known simply as the "Blue-backed Speller."  In the next two years he expanded his work with a grammar book and reader that appeared in the same distinctive blue cover.  This series of texts was edited  and revised several times over the next  sixty years.  After over 250 printings Webster‚s work became undoubtedly the most popular schoolbook ever published in the United States.

     Webster continued to work as a teacher while also spending a great deal of time studying law, traveling, and getting into local politics.  In 1800, Webster began work on his most noteworthy accomplishment, the first American dictionary.  For over 25 years Webster worked on the American Dictionary.  By the time that it was first published, in 1828, his dictionary was far superior to any other work of its kind.  It appeared in two volumes and contained definitions and complete etymologies of over 70,000 words.  The American Dictionary covered scientific and technical terms, terms that were specifically from American culture and institutions, and a large amount of encyclopedic information.  Although Webster‚s spelling in the dictionary is more conservative than his spelling in the later editions of the "Blue-backed Speller," his ideas about English as an American language are very evident.
 Webster had specific ideas about how American English should differed from British English and he did a lot to bring about these changes by publishing them in his speller and dictionary.  Webster proposed dropping the -u from words ending in -our, making words like flavour into flavor.  He changed words that ended in -ick to a simpler  -ic ending, like musick to music.  Webster changed other spelling patterns including -re to -er (centre to center), -ce to -se (offence to offense), and -que to -k (cheque to check).  He also popularized rules for spelling certain words differently depending on the stress.  Some changes that he proposed, unlike the aforementioned that we all now recognize and use, never became popular.  He tried unsuccessfully to drop the final -e from words like definite and examine and eliminate silent letters in many words.

    Noah Webster is responsible for many changes in the history of American English.  His textbooks taught children for nearly 100 years and his dictionary is still alive today, taking on revisions and additions since its first publishing 172 years ago.  He dedicated his life to pushing forward our language and our culture, missions in which he met with the utmost success.  As our language continues to grow and change, the Webster name will ring with familiarity in every home across the United States. *
 Visit Merriam-Webster online to see what Noah Webster started!

Visit the Noah Webster House Museum of West Hartford History online!

* Information for this page from the above websites and:
    Crystal, David.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.  Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY.  1995.
    Scudder, Horace.  Noah Webster.  Houghton, Mifflin, and Company.  Boston, MA.  1886.
 

 page by Gavin Fitts