1. Noah Webster & The Morden American Language.

2. Noah Webster & American Language. Noah Webster, Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843), was a lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education." His blue-backed speller books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read, and made their education more secular and less religious. According to Ellis (1979) he gave Americans "a secular catechism to the nation-state."

3. Blue Backed Speller As a teacher, he had come to dislike American elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses. Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children.

4. His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar.

5. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions." The Speller was arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it progressed by age. From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought the Speller should be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation. The speller was originally titled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

6. Over the course of 385 editions in his lifetime, the title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book. Most people called it the "Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue cover, and for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time; by 1837 it had sold 15 million copies, and some 60 million by 1890— reaching the majority of young students in the nation's first century. Webster's Speller was entirely secular. It ended with two pages of important dates in American history, beginning with Columbus's in 1492 and ending with the battle of Yorktown in 1781. There was no mention of God, the Bible, or sacred events.

7. Webster’s Influence on American Spelling. Slowly, edition by edition, Webster changed the spelling of words, making them "Americanized.“ Webster had declared boldly for simpler spellings in his early spelling books; in his dictionary of 1806 he made an assault at all arms upon some of the dearest prejudices of English lexicographers. Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin, that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell”—i. e., who spell phonetically and logically—he made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters—the u in the -our words, the final e in determine and requisite, the silent a in thread, feather and steady, the silent b in thumb, the s in island, the o in leopard, and the redundant consonants in traveler, wagon, jeweler, etc. (English: traveller, waggon, jeweller).

8. More, he lopped the final k from frolick, physick and their analogues. Yet more, he transposed the e and the r in many words ending in re, such as theatre, lustre, centre and calibre. Yet more, he changed the c in all words of the defence class to s. Yet more, he changed ph to fin words of the phantom class, ou to oo in words of the group class, ow to ou in crowd, porpoise to porpess, acre to aker, sew to soe, woe to wo, soot to sut, gaol to jail, andplough to plow. Finally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from tung for tongue to wimmen for women, and fromhainous for heinous to cag for keg. He also changed "tongue" to "tung"—an innovation that never caught on.

9. Dictionary In 1806, 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 eighteen years to complete. 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.

10. Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand 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. He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828, registering the copyright on April 14.

11. Though it now has an honored place in the history of American English, Webster's first dictionary only sold 2,500 copies. He was forced to mortgage his home to develop a second edition, and his life from then on was plagued with debt. Lepore (2008) demonstrates Webster's innovative ideas about language and politics and shows why Webster's endeavors were at first so poorly received. Culturally conservative Federalists (the than Americans) denounced the work as radical—too inclusive in its lexicon and even bordering on vulgar.

12. American vs British English Words. dependant or dependent: British dictionaries distinguish between dependent (adjective) anddependant (noun). In the US, dependent is usual for both noun and adjective, notwithstanding that dependant is also an acceptable variant for the noun form in the US. disc or disk: Traditionally, disc used to be British and disk American. enquiry or inquiry: According to Fowler, inquiry should be used in relation to a formal inquest, and enquiry to the act of questioning. Many (though not all) British writers maintain this distinction; the OED, on the other hand, lists inquiry and enquiry as equal alternatives, in that order. In the US, only inquiry is commonly used.

13. ensure or insure: In the UK, the word ensure (to make sure, to make certain) has a distinct meaning from the word insure (often followed by against – to guarantee or protect against, typically by means of an "insurance policy"). In American usage, insure may also be used in the former sense, butensure may not be used in the latter sense. tonne or ton: In the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the spelling tonne refers to the metric unit (1000 kilograms), whereas in the US the same unit is called a metric ton. The unqualified ton usually refers to the long ton (2,240 pounds (1,020 kg).

14. Different Spellings for Different Pronunciations