nguage from the corrupting political and social influences of the European Nations of his day. He preserved the language with a pure connection to the original roots in other languages and provided a necessary tool for our new nationand all later generationsto understand the writings of the Founders and Framers of the Constitution. Webster's eagerness to improve the language made him the first to archive distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. He urged the alteration of many wordsmusick to music, centre to center, and plough to plowrationalizing that many spelling customs were unnatural and pointless. Although these attempts were widely accepted as the norm, various other attempts at reform were less acknowledged, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen. He disputed "the old and true spelling" most accurately indicated the pronunciation of a word. While Webster was promoting his dictionary, George and Charles Merriam opened a printing and bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1831. The G. & C. Merriam Co., which was renamed Merriam-Webster Inc. in 1982, inherited the Webster legacy when the Merriam brothers bought the unsold copies of the 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged from Webster's heirs after his death in 1843. During this process, they attained the rights to create revised editions of that work. Thus began a publishing tradition that has forged ahead without interruption, known today as Merriam-Webster. Eventually Webster's dictionaries were purchased by the G. C. Merriam Company, giving them the right to call their publications Webster's dictionaries, but subsequently the name Webster has gone into the public domain, and any dictionary company wishing to make its product seem more authoritative appends Webster to the title. The upshot of that is the term Webster's on the front of a dictionary h...
