Noah Webster

Calixtro Santos Mrs. Wells English III -5 6 October 2009 Noah Webster report There are so many people who think Daniel Webster or Marian Webster wrote the first dictionary and to those people I like to say “read some”. The man who was always a man name Noah Webster wrote the first dictionary and his cousin is Daniel Webster who passed the first copyright law in the U.S.A with the help of Noah. Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758 and was reputed to be an American lexicographer, textbook author, spelling reformer, word enthusiast, and editor. He was born in the West division of Hartford, Connecticut to a family who lived in Connecticut since colonial days. His father was Noah, Sir a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster and his mother was Mercy a descendant of Governor William Bradford one of the very first governors in the Colonies. His parents had two more children which are his two brothers, Abraham and Charles. Noah began to attend Yale at the age of 16, but his four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War, and because of shortage of ratios a lot of his classes were at Glastonbury, Connecticut a town south –east of Hartford. During the war he served in the Connecticut Militia. When Noah graduated from Yale, he wanted to pursue his education in law, so he became a teacher and taught at Glastonbury, Hartford, and West Hartford to pay for his education. In time he got his degree but didn’t practice it for eight years and found that law was to his dislike so he tried teaching, setting up several little school that didn’t succeed. When Noah married Rebecca Greenleaf on October 26, 1789, in New Haven, Connecticut he laid the seeds for eight glamorous children. Noah was like children a lot that he would carry raisins and candies in his pocket for them. Even though he married into the elite of Hartford he was short on money and when Alexander Hamilton loaned him $1500 to move to New York City to edit a Federalist newspaper he took the offer, and in December, he founded New York’s first daily newspaper, American Minerva. Noah became one of the most known authors in the new nation, publishing textbooks, political essays for his Federalist Party, and newspaper articles that it would take 655 pages to write a modern bibliography of is published works . Noah move back to New Haven in 1798 and then served in the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and 1802-1807. Noah hated American elementary schools due to them being over crowed and having unsatisfactory rooms with books from somewhere else that use words that they no longer use or were archaic, so Noah began by writing a three volume compendium, a Grammatical Institute of the English Language which included of a speller, grammar, and a reader to teach children an American Approach instead of the Old English. Noah set a standard for English in the new nation and he wrote the first dictionary. As with most of the people in the United States in the beginning were religious so was Noah that he wrote the Common Version of the Bible which uses word that was current to his time. In order for Noah to write the dictionary he had to learn several languages and when he publish his dictionary it had 12000 words which had never being put in any other dictionary, yet his dictionary didn’t sell but 2,500 copies and in order to publish his second one he had to mortgage his house and became deeply in debt . In 1840 the

second edition was published in two volumes, and on May 28, 1843 he died still trying to get his dictionary recognized. He claimed to have learned 20 different languages and he believe that the government should be base on Christianity. Noah is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.