Webster, NOAH, lexicographer, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, 16th October 1758. His studies at Yale College were interrupted by service in his father's company of militia in the war of independence, but he graduated in 1778, and thereafter took to teaching and to the study of law, being admitted to the bar in 1781. But he soon returned to teaching, and made so great a hit with the spelling-book which formed part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (3 parts, 1783-85) that for twenty years he and his family lived on its meagre royalty of less than one cent a copy. Political articles and pamphlets, lecturing, journalism at New York, a few years' prosperous practice of law at Hartford, and again journalism in a fresh venture at New York occupied his life till 1798, when he retired to a life of literary labour at New Haven. Here, with the exception of the years 1812-22 spent at Amherst, Massachusetts, he lived till his death, 28th May 1843.
Long a devoted student of the English tongue, he published A Philosophical and Practical English Grammar (1807), and the famous American Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols. 4to, 1828), the fruit of the labours of twenty years.
A second edition followed in two volumes (1840-41), with a supplement in 1843. The chief later editions were those by Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich, his son-in-law (1847), that of 1864 (edited after Goodrich's death in 1860 by Noah Porter), in which the etymologies were by Dr C. A. F. Mahn of Berlin (supplement in 1879 by Professor F. B. Dexter), and the revision of 1890 executed under the supervision of Professor Noah Porter. See the Life by Horace E. Scudder in the 'Men of Letters' series (Boston, 1882).