He (Noah Webster) had no conception of the enormous weight of the English language and literature, when he undertook to shovel it out of the path of American civilization.
Dictionary Quotes
Webster, (Noah) the pioneer in many fields of endeavor on the American intellectual frontier, taught the masses to spell and read. He was truly the schoolmaster of the Republic.
The ease with which Webster walked about the Jericho of English lexicography, blowing his trumpet of destruction, was an American ease, born of a sense that America was a continent and not a province.
I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot. (dictionary)
I have contributed in a small degree, to the instruction of at least four million of the rising generation; and it is not unreasonable to expect that a few seeds of improvement planted by my hand, may germinate and grow and ripen into valuable fruit, when my remains shall be mingled with the dust.
The great American dictionary maker Noah Webster was a renowned philanderer. One day Mrs Webster found the wordsman in bed with the chambermaid. “Noah, I am surprised,” huffed the offended wife. Thereupon Webster drew himself up righteously and informed her, “No madam, you are astonished. I am surprised.”
I’ve been in Who’s Who and I know what’s what, but this is the first time I’ve been in the dictionary. (On becoming a life jacket)
I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.(On the task of editing Shakespeare, which John Hawkins told Johnson should be intrinsically […]
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.
