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Webster finished the dictionary in England—he was such an outcast that he actually thought he’d have better luck publishing it over there. Webster’s two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language was published in New Haven in 1828. He died on May 28, 1843—he had followed up on the dictionary by translating the Bible—and is buried next to Eli Whitney, in the Grove Street Cemetery, near the Yale campus, in New Haven. I have visited the cemetery, walked through its monumental Egyptian gate, and been drawn down the path to his obelisk as if by magnetism. But the real monument to Noah Webster is back up the Connecticut River Valley in Springfield, Massachusetts.
George and Charles Merriam, of West Brookfield, Massachusetts, bought the copyright to Webster’s Dictionary after his death and had the tact and perspicacity to hire Webster’s son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich, a professor at Yale, to oversee a revision. The dictionary was published in one volume in 1847. The Merriam-Webster building in Springfield is a substantial two-story red brick building with the initials NW intertwined in bas-relief, surrounded by laurel wreaths, over the door. On the first floor are the business and publicity offices, with relics in glass showcases (a copy of the Compendious; Charles Merriam’s copy of Webster’s original two-volume edition). The lexicography department is upstairs. It would be enough to make Noah Webster dance. In the center of the floor, covering an area the size of a small orchard, are the citation files—an alphabetical index of clippings showing the written words in all their contexts, stamped with the dates and the initials of lexicographers—and along the walls are shelves holding every edition of the unabridged (from 1864) and the collegiate (beginning in 1898), and above the files are source books: a multivolume Middle English dictionary, concordances to Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, Keats, Joyce. . . . Around the perimeter are the lexicographers’ offices. There are lexicographers specializing in various fields (geography, religion, law, music, trademarks), along with definers (definitions are vetted by several editors before going into the dictionary), daters, cross-referencers, pronouncers, and etymologists. (Early on, the Merriam brothers had brought in a German scholar to emend Webster’s spurious etymologies.) One office holds the black books of E. Ward Gilman, with his notes for Web 3, and a shelf that overflows with usage manuals.
As Merriam-Webster points out on the copyright page of its dictionaries, any publisher can slap the name Webster onto its dictionary, but only Merriam-Webster, in the persons of George and Charles Merriam, dealt directly with Noah Webster’s family; the others are like the variations on the Original Ray’s Pizza, the mythical New York pizzeria, all trying to cash in on a famous name.
In Springfield, I got a tour of the office from Peter Sokolowski, who was hired by Merriam-Webster to edit a French-English dictionary and stayed on. He and his colleagues are the people behind (and on) the Merriam-Webster Web site. The unabridged dictionary is now online in an updated edition (Web 4? Web eternal?), which, like the original Webster’s, is sold by subscription. (It’s a lot cheaper than it was in Noah Webster’s day. His two-volume magnum opus cost twenty dollars, which was a small fortune in 1828; a subscription to the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged is thirty dollars a year.) On the Web site, lexicographers pop up like gophers, inviting you to learn points of grammar and usage (“It is I” vs. “It’s me,” “Hopefully,” “Flat adverbs”). There are word games, a word of the day, trending words (from the news), a blog. Some drudges! These people are having far too much fun to be lexicographers. The free online dictionary invites you to report where you found the word you’re looking up. I was put off by that stuff at first—it’s terrible to say, but when I am researching a word I am not looking for an interactive experience. I want it to be just me and my Webster’s. But once I had penetrated to the heart of the valley of lexicography, to the editorial refrigerator in the lunchroom (a grouchy dater kicked us out), I melted.
“There are other dictionaries,” Sokolowski allowed. I’d noticed a volume of Funk & Wagnalls on the shelf. He told me that after the great dictionary war of the sixties the New York Times and every other newspaper in the country and the AP dropped Merriam-Webster’s and went with Webster’s New World, issued by the World Publishing Company. Its offices were in Cleveland. I remember the globe bulging out the side of the building, a landmark just before the left turn onto West Boulevard. Besides the Plain Dealer, this was the only place in Cleveland where one might pursue a publishing career. I used to pass it on the way to the pool where I was a foot checker.