above. He also added many distinctive American words to the official lexicon, including skunk, squash, hickory, chowder and lengthy (Brett Website). His changes were not without their critics. One critic particularly hated the word “lengthy” and pondered angrily if the next edition would allow words such as “strengthy.” Webster defended his dictionary by reflecting on its descriptive tone. He recognized that language change is inevitable, saying, “The process of a living language is like the motion of a broad river which flows with a slow, silent, irresistible current.” (Noah Webster Gets a Website). His dictionary was not complete, and in 1828 he published it again in its final form, the American Dictionary of the English Language (Millward 305). He removed many of his more radical changes, including those listed above, but made many other changes. He changed the spelling of many closed morphemes from the original British in order to create a look that was distinctively American. Among the changes: -ourbecame-oras inhonour/honor-rebecame -eras in theatre/theater-quebecame -ck or –kas incheque/check, masque/mask-ckbecame -cas in traffick/traffic-isebecame-izeas in Americanise/AmericanizeIn addition, the phoneme [s] that was spelled /c/ was, for the most part, spelled /s/ by Webster in order to simplify matters, as in defence/defense (Webster, Noah Encarta).The dictionary included 5000 words that had never appeared before in any other dictionary (Webster, Noah Encarta), for a grand total of 70,000 words, more than any dictionary that had come before it (Millward 305). It also, unlike previous dictionaries, was a comprehensive dictionary, including many technical and scientific words rather than just words from literature. His American Dictionary was the first to list word senses in the chronological order in which they first appeared in the English language. He also completed his ext...
