Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language
On this day · 14 April 1828
On April 14, 1828, Noah Webster issued a 70,000-word dictionary that gave American English its own spellings and identity.
On April 14, 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language. The two-volume work listed roughly 70,000 entries, thousands more than any rival, and it was among the last great dictionaries compiled almost single-handedly by one person.
Webster had spent decades on the project, deliberately shaping a distinctly American form of English. He trimmed letters from British spellings, giving the new nation color instead of colour, theater instead of theatre, and defense for defence.
He also folded in thousands of homegrown words the old British dictionaries ignored.
The dictionary did more than define words; it argued that a young republic needed its own voice on the page. Its conventions still govern how Americans spell today, and the Webster name remains shorthand for the dictionary itself.
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