Noah Webster

Hi, my name is Noah Webster. I am generally considered the “Father of American Scholarship and Education”. At the time, elementary schools were crowded with up to seventy children of all ages in one-room schoolhouses with poor equipment and untrained teachers. This alone would it make it hard enough for children to learn even without the fact that there wasn't a standardized English grammar and spelling system. Our education system was outrageously antiquated and impractical. With that thought in mind, I published a three volume compendium A Grammatical Institute of the English Language made of a speller, grammar, and a reader in 1785 and An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. Commonly considered by many to be the first dictionaries created in the United States (and the predecessor of the modern-day Merriam-Webster), the speller was nicknamed the “Blue-Backed Speller” and was the best-selling American book of the mid-19th century. I tried to make the dictionary simple with rules for spelling and pronunciation. With this in mind, I replaced words such as “colour” and “centre” with “color” and “center” respectively. Since British English was too unnecessarily complicated and aristocratic, my dictionary allowed for more “Americanized” spelling.