Noah Webster
Artist: James Herring (American, 1794-1867)
Date: 1833
Medium: Oil on wood
Collection: National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, United States
Description
Noah Webster (1758 – 1843) is justly considered a polymath for his contributions to a staggering range of fields, including educational reform, antislavery advocacy, epidemiology, journalism, and copyright law. Yet he is primarily remembered as the lexicographer of the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), whose legacy lives on in today’s Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Webster’s American Dictionary surpassed Samuel Johnson’s groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755) by documenting words, idioms, and pronunciations that were unique to the United States. He standardized the simplified spellings that still differentiate American English from British English, dropping the “u” from “colour,” for example.
