The Dictionary Wars

February 25, 2019
Martin (Samuel Johnson: A Biography), a retired English professor, reanimates a 19th-century “civil war over words” that shaped how Americans speak and write in this lively, if overly granular, history. Noah Webster’s dispute with rival lexicographer Joseph Worcester, Martin claims, illuminates America’s search to “know itself” in a period of drastic changes in print technology, demographics, and education. However, Martin spends less time on seismic cultural shifts than on the gritty details of how the battle between Webster and Worcester’s opposing dictionaries played out in advertising campaigns and on newspaper editorial pages. Extensively quoting from contemporary sources, he dramatizes Webster as a “herculean but unscientific” crusader for the standardization of American English, and Worcester as a serious-minded scholar wearied by a “degradingly shabby commercial war.” He also depicts brothers Charles and George Merriam, who acquired Webster’s copyright after his 1843 death, as ruthless businessmen driven to control the U.S. dictionary market. Martin’s research unearths some colorful examples of invective—Webster remarked of one pro-Worcester partisan that “I am told {as a child} he was addicted to lying for which he was flogged”—though the central conflict eventually becomes repetitive. Martin never quite delivers the bigger picture promised at the book’s start, but anyone who loves words for their own sake will be entertained.