We all know there are few activities as satisfyingly conclusive as looking a word up in a dictionary. A dictionary definition is synonymous with unbiased and certain fact. Dictionaries are institutions of staid and magisterial certainty.
Nothing could be farther from the truth! Two of the most respected dictionaries in the English language are rooted in a 19th century ideological struggle that grew in part from an 18th century.
Noah Webster wrote in 1828 in the introduction to his American Dictionary of the English Language:
"It is not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country, should have a American Dictionary of the English Language; for although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences exist. Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve the identity of ideas that cannot retain an identity of language."
Webster himself was an ardent American nationalist and revolutionary. He was a constitutional pamphleteer and an editor of the Federalist Party newspaper. He viewed his dictionary as an active agent of American exceptionalism. Indeed in the introduction to his dictionary he wrote:
"I present it to my fellow citizens, not with frigid indifference, but with my ardent wishes for their improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of the character, and the glory of my country."
Webster’s dictionary was not a cold and impartial arbiter of language but as a lively argument for “the glory of my country”. The dictionary had a parochial guiding vision. It denigrated references to King’s commissions and outmoded terms of nobility such as heraldry while lifting up American institutions such as land-office and selectmen.
Thirty years later the Philological Society of London would enunciate an entirely different purpose for a dictionary. In 1859 the Unregistered Words Committee published a ‘Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society’ which declaimed in its first principle:
"The first requirement of every lexicon is that it should contain every word occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate."
It was almost thirty years until this proposal was realized in the complete Oxford English Dictionary.
This dictionary was presented to both the English King George the Fifth and the President of the United States. Though it might be noted the particular President (Calvin Coolidge) remained unnamed in the 1933 preface. The compilers of this dictionary rejected the parochialism of a national dictionary. They claimed to represent a comprehensive record of the entire language. This was the magisterial and authoritative dictionary of today’s imagination.
Yet it is important to remember that the heart of the dictionary is an argument. More it is an argument about words. Webster and the Philological Society represent two arguments in a fight over your words. In essence they are fighting over the contents of your very thoughts.
Who would have thought just picking up a dictionary could be so dangerous?
If you dare, visit the State of Oregon Law Library and take a look at copies of every edition of both the
Oxford English Dictionary and
Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language
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