Dictionary Day

What the day is

Dictionary Day is observed on October 16, the birthday of Noah Webster, born in Connecticut in 1758.

Origin and background

Webster's project was political as much as linguistic. He believed a new republic needed its own literature, its own schooling and its own written language, distinct from Britain's. His spelling book, published in the 1780s, taught generations of American children to read and sold in enormous quantities for decades.

The dictionary took him over twenty years, and he learned a substantial number of languages while compiling it in order to trace etymologies. An American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, containing around seventy thousand entries, a significant number of which had never been recorded in a dictionary before, including many words specific to American life.

Several spelling differences between American and British English trace directly to his advocacy: color rather than colour, center rather than centre, defense rather than defence, and traveled with one L. He proposed far more radical reforms that were rejected, and the surviving set is the compromise.

The deeper argument in lexicography is between describing and prescribing. A descriptive dictionary records how words are actually used, including uses that irritate people; a prescriptive one rules on correctness. Modern dictionaries are overwhelmingly descriptive, which is why entries appear for meanings that some readers consider errors, and why publishing a new sense of a word reliably produces complaints.

How to take part

• Look up a word you use constantly and have never checked. The results are frequently surprising.
• Read the etymology rather than only the definition; it is the most interesting part of any entry.
• Try a historical dictionary, which shows how a meaning shifted across centuries with dated quotations.
• Look up a word in both an American and a British dictionary and compare.
• Teach a child to use a physical dictionary once. Browsing finds words that searching never will.