Merriam Webster Dictionary Spelling Bee
Nella Mcnairy
The wisdom in spelling cold as we do was long understood before Noah Webster's time, but we can credit him with the fact that mould as a spelling of mold has not had centuries to trip up American school children trying to also master could, should, and would. Webster dubbed the mould spelling "incorrect orthography" in his 1828 dictionary.
We don't know if Elvis Presley ever acknowledged his indebtedness to Noah Webster, but we will note here that "Gaolhouse Rock" just doesn't look as rock 'n' roll as "Jailhouse Rock." Webster had fully committed to jail over gaol from the time of his 1806 dictionary. His choice had a solid pedigree: jail comes from Middle English jaiole, which in turn comes from from Anglo-French gaiole, jaiole.
Thanks to Noah Webster, American English users don't have to explain to their children that draught rhymes with raft in direct contradiction to the much more common past tense forms of catch and teach: caught and taught. Webster himself included the form draught in a few definitions in his 1806 dictionary, demonstrating that spelling habits can die hard.
Noah Webster didn't include the past tense form of travel in his 1806 dictionary, but he did include traveller, with two "l's." By his 1828 dictionary, he'd decided on traveler and included the past tense form traveled as well, paving the way for Robert Frost to write the famous lines "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
Noah Webster appears to have had no doubts about including only the center spelling of this word in both his 1806 and 1828 dictionaries, despite the fact that Samuel Johnson included only centre in his 1755 dictionary. Johnson's choice was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, likely based on a very particular edition of an earlier dictionary by one Nathan Bailey: while all 30 editions of Bailey's dictionary featured the "er" spelling of center (which was likewise used in editions of Shakespeare, Milton, and others), the folio edition of Bailey's dictionary was the one Johnson used, and it employed centre. Hence, today's British "city centre" and the American "shopping center."
How comforting would it be if ache were spelled to match the words with which it rhymes, such as bake and cake and take and wake. But no, despite Noah Webster's efforts, ache is the spelling we've got, and its contribution to headaches induces in us only the wannest of smiles. That it stands in orthographic affront to such susurrus words as ganache, mustache, cache, and panache is all the more tragic.
The soop spelling of soup had been kicking around for more than 100 years by the time Noah Webster was advocating for it. It would indeed make good sense if this word looked like its rhyming relations like coop, hoop, and loop. But Americans were having none of it: they insisted on maintaining the French-looking "ou" when considering the contents of their soup bowls. Webster also aimed for croop (for croup) and groop (for group), to no avail.
While lunge did indeed fully replace longe for sudden forward movements in the spelling of American English users, spunge as a spelling of sponge has not soaked in. Both were put forward in Webster's 1806 dictionary, at which point lunge had only been extant in the language for a few decades. Sponge, on the other hand, dates back to Old English, and had been spelled with both "u" and "o" as its vowel over the centuries. Why sponge prevailed may have to do with its origins in Latin spongia, from Greek spongia, which were likely known to those schooled in science.
But he'd abandoned that fight by the time of his 1828 dictionary, which includes nothing between its entries for wimbrel and wimple. The spelling we've been left with gives us the only English word in which the letter "o" sounds like \i\.
To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it's used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.
Each day most Merriam-Webster editors devote an hour or two to reading a cross section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic publications; in our office this activity is called "reading and marking." The editors scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and inflected formsin short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the dictionary, understanding what it means, and determining typical usage. Any word of interest is marked, along with surrounding context that offers insight into its form and use.
Merriam-Webster's citation files, which were begun in the 1880s, now contain 15.7 million examples of words used in context and cover all aspects of the English vocabulary. Citations are also available to editors in a searchable text database (linguists call it a corpus) that includes more than 70 million words drawn from a great variety of sources.
The process begins with dictionary editors reviewing groups of citations. Definers start by looking at citations covering a relatively small segment of the alphabet for example gri- to gro- along with the entries from the dictionary being reedited that are included within that alphabetical section. It is the definer's job to determine which existing entries can remain essentially unchanged, which entries need to be revised, which entries can be dropped, and which new entries should be added. In each case, the definer decides on the best course of action by reading through the citations and using the evidence in them to adjust entries or create new ones.
Before a new word can be added to the dictionary, it must have enough citations to show that it is widely used. But having a lot of citations is not enough; in fact, a large number of citations might even make a word more difficult to define, because many citations show too little about the meaning of a word to be helpful. A word may be rejected for entry into a general dictionary if all of its citations come from a single source or if they are all from highly specialized publications that reflect the jargon of experts within a single field.
To be included in a Merriam-Webster dictionary, a word must be used in a substantial number of citations that come from a wide range of publications over a considerable period of time. Specifically, the word must have enough citations to allow accurate judgments about its establishment, currency, and meaning.
The number and range of citations needed to add a word to the dictionary varies. In rare cases, a word jumps onto the scene and is both instantly prevalent and likely to last, as was the case in the 1980s with AIDS. In such a situation, the editors determine that the word has become firmly established in a relatively short time and should be entered in the dictionary, even though its citations may not span the wide range of years exhibited by other words.
The size and type of dictionary also affects how many citations a word needs to gain admission. Because an abridged dictionary, such as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, has fairly limited space, only the most commonly used words can be entered; to get into that type of dictionary, a word must be supported by a significant number of citations. But a large unabridged dictionary, such as Webster's Third New International Dictionary, has room for many more words, so terms with fewer citations can still be included.
Change and variation are as natural in language as they are in other areas of human life and Merriam-Webster reference works must reflect that fact. By relying on citational evidence, we hope to keep our publications grounded in the details of current usage so they can calmly and dispassionately offer information about modern English. That way, our references can speak with authority without being authoritarian.
In 1841, 82-year-old Noah Webster published a second edition of his lexicographical masterpiece with the help of his son, William G. Webster. Its title page does not claim the status of second edition, merely noting that this new edition was the "first edition in octavo" in contrast to the quarto format of the first edition of 1828. Again in two volumes, the title page proclaimed that the Dictionary contained "the whole vocabulary of the quarto, with corrections, improvements and several thousand additional words: to which is prefixed an introductory dissertation on the origin, history and connection of the languages of western Asia and Europe, with an explanation of the principles on which languages are formed.[8] B. L. Hamlen of New Haven, Connecticut, prepared the 1841 printing of the second edition.[9]
Austin (2005) explores the intersection of lexicographical and poetic practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's dictionaries. He shows the ways in which American poetry has inherited Webster and drawn upon his lexicography to reinvent it. Austin explicates key definitions from both the Compendious (1806), and American (1828) dictionaries and brings into its discourse a range of concerns including the politics of American English, the question of national identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, and the poetics of citation and of definition.[full citation needed]
Webster's dictionaries were a redefinition of Americanism within the context of an emergent and unstable American socio-political and cultural identity. Webster's identification of his project as a "federal language" shows his competing impulses towards regularity and innovation in historical terms. Perhaps the contradictions of Webster's project represented a part of a larger dialectical play between liberty and order within Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary political debates.[16]
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