- published: 04 Nov 2015
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Merriam-Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a subsidiary of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1964.
In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took 27 years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned 26 languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country used different languages. They also spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently.
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained 70,000 words, of which 12,000 had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing "colour" with "color", "waggon" with "wagon", and "centre" with "center". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of 70, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2,500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes.
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Nearest The Positive-Merriam Webster Ain't Got Nothin On Me
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The Longest Word in the Dictionary - Merriam-Webster Ask the Editor
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Draw Near - Miriam Webster