Webster and His Dictionaries

Webster’s has become a term of authority in American English and a generic trade name for a whole lexicographical stable deriving from the initiatives of the founding father and great champion of America’s linguistic independence, Noah Webster (1758–1843). The major milestones in this huge enterprise were Webster I , edited by Webster himself (1828), Webster II , edited by William Allan Neilson (1934), and Webster III , edited by Philip Gove (1961). Webster in fact styled his first edition An American Dictionary of the English Language , while the Second and Third adopted his name, becoming Webster’s New International Dictionary. (Websterian had become an eponym for his enterprise even by 1790.) While the first two editions were greeted with critical acclaim, the third generated a furious controversy involving a number of substantial literary figures and academics.

Noah Webster was astonishingly industrious, producing in addition to his American Dictionary, An American Spelling Book (1783) and A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), all of which went through numerous editions. He had a great range of interests, being “active as grammarian, lexicographer, essayist, newspaper editor, educator, lawyer, politician, farmer and … scientific observer” (Krapp 1925, 368). Sir James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary , praised him in The Evolution of English Lexicography as “a great man, a born definer of words” (1900, 43). H.L. Mencken characterized him less favorably: “There was nothing of the traditional pedagogue about him—no sign of caution, policy, mousiness. He launched his numerous reforms and innovations with great boldness, and defended them in a forthright and often raucous manner…. It was almost impossible for him to imagine himself in error” (1963, 13). Webster criticized somewhat cavalierly distinguished predecessors like Dr. Samuel Johnson and Sir William Jones, and was ignorant of current developments in comparative philology, so that in etymology his work “illustrates the extreme isolation and provincialism of American scholarship in the early years of the nineteenth century” (Krapp 1925, 365).

Webster had written that “The business of the lexicographer is to collect, arrange, and define as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language” and had criticized “the man who undertakes to censure others for the use of certain words” for “seeming to arrogate to himself a dictatorial authority” (cited in Warfel, ed., 1953, 350, 367). Yet he had an undoubtedly puritanical streak, criticizing those English dictionaries that “contain obscene and vulgar terms, improper to be repeated before children” (Krapp 1925, 361-62). In particular he castigated Johnson’s inclusion of what he called “vulgar words and offensive ribaldry,” arguing that “the national language and the national morals are corrupted and debased” (Green 1996, 258). Although Johnson had included most of the “excretory” four-letter words without qualms or comment, he had drawn the line at fuck and cunt , unlike his predecessor Nathaniel Bailey. Webster proved to be more squeamish—for example, defining sodomy euphemistically as “a crime against nature.” In his later years he turned to editing the Bible (1833), writing “I consider this … the most important enterprise of my life.” This he bowdlerized thoroughly, excising words like womb and generating such quaint euphemisms as “peculiar members” for stones (i.e., testicles), preferring lewdness for “fornication,” while the graphic phrase to give suck became “to nourish.” Mencken claimed that “he expunged many verses altogether” (1936, 303). According to his granddaughter, “the words stink, suck, dung [and] belly … fell before his hand.” She recorded in some reminiscences: “In my many months of residence with him I never saw him roused to anger but once, and that was when a dubious and rather indelicate word was mentioned before him” (Read 1934, 273).

The Third Edition started with the search for an editor upon the death of Neilson in 1946 and took six years. The editor-elect, Dr. Philip Gove, was not a distinguished authority, but had a sound academic background with research on Johnson’s Dictionary . Unlike Webster and Murray, Gove was not a polymath; like all modern editors, he delegated and expected the team to follow set procedures. He detested time-wasting, severely limited the role of the editorial board in discussion, but brought out the Third Edition in ten years as scheduled, a notable feat in lexicography. Gove proposed a “complete and detailed scrutiny of every feature” and a radical reduction of the encyclopedic material to make way for about 100,000 new words and meanings. The policy statement envisioned “primarily a Dictionary of the Standard Language as used throughout the English speaking world” (Morton 1994, 62).

The launch of the Webster III in September 1961 generated a lexicographical controversy of unique ferocity, mainly deriving from the perception that the dictionary had adopted a laissez faire policy in matters of usage, thereby abandoning its assumed role as arbiter and authority in setting the standard. In so doing, the Webster team had, in the eyes of its critics, kowtowed to the current “permissive school” of descriptive linguistics. The treatment of slang was especially criticized on the grounds that “slang labels were not used enough and they were not applied consistently” (Morton 1994, 248). A notably vehement and revealing series of tirades attacked the entry on ain’t . The details and texts of the main exchanges are collected in an ironically titled casebook, Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary , edited by James Sledd and Wilma Ebbitt (1962).

However, there were other inconsistencies indicating that the Third was not truly “permissive” either. The work excluded fuck , then starting to emerge in general currency, but included cunt , which was (and is) far more taboo, with the curiously mild usage note “usually considered obscene.” (In fairness to Gove, fuck was excised at galley stage by Gordon J. Gallan, then president of Merriam-Webster.) Less surprisingly, motherfucker was also excluded. At the time these omissions attracted little comment, although they showed that there was no clear policy on obscene language.

On another front, the usage markers concerning religious, racial, and ethnic entries were criticized in an article by Philip Perlmutter, “Prejudice Memorialized,” in Frontier magazine in 1965. Perlmutter noted that entries for kike, dago, nigger, spick, sheeny , and coon were followed by the usage note “usually taken to be offensive.” He objected that this was a “strange explanation” in that it suggested that the word itself is essentially neutral. “Taking offense implies an innocence on the part of the speaker and a sensitivity, if not fault, on the part of the listener,” thus carrying the implication that “the words are free of any offending characteristics” (Morton 1994, 237-38). Perlmutter also questioned on what basis the editors had arrived at the distinction between “usually” and “often taken to be offensive.”

While Perlmutter’s basic observation is sound, there is a semantic distinction between “taking offense” and “usually taken to be offensive.” Second, the degree of offense usually depends on the speaker and the context, in view of the phenomenon of reclamation of opprobrious terms whereby offensive or stigmatizing labels and ethnic slurs are often used by outgroups within the group in an ironic or affectionate fashion. However, Perlmutter was on stronger ground in preferring the usage marker “usually used disparagingly” found in the entries for papist and wop . More disturbing were the definitions for Jesuit , “one given to intrigue and equivocation,” and Jew , “a person believed to drive a hard bargain,” neither of which carried any usage marker. As Herbert C. Morton sums up the lexicographical problem, “Gove had not set out to offend any minority group…. But he had not thought of putting the onus on the speaker rather than the hearer” (1994, 237-38).

The sensitivity surrounding ethnic slurs led to two responses. The editor-in-chief of Webster’s New World Dictionary , Second College Edition (1970), Dr. David B. Guralnik, simply excluded terms such as kike, dago, wog , and wop , justifying the policy in the following editorial statement:

It was decided in the selection process that this dictionary could easily dispense with those true obscenities, the terms of racial or ethnic opprobrium, that are in any case encountered with less frequency nowadays.

(Foreward, viii)

Outside the Webster stable, Dr. Robert L. Chapman, the editor of The New Dictionary of American Slang (1986), instituted usage markers in the form of symbolic triangles, outlined (?) for obscene words and solid black (?) for taboo terms “never to be used.” He categorized “terms of contempt and derision for racial and other groups” as taboo.

In contrast to the serious setback suffered in the launch of Webster III in the United States, the work was well reviewed in Britain by major scholars. In retrospect, it seems to have suffered from a misguided publicity campaign that positioned the work wrongly in a hostile climate of opinion. However, the editor of the OED Supplement , Robert Burchfield, commented that Gove had an “over-literal interpretation of the function of a dictionary as a record of usage rather than as a prescriptive guide” (Morton 1994, 248).