Worcester, JOSEPH EMERSON

Worcester, JOSEPH EMERSON, lexicographer, was born at Bedford, New Hampshire, August 24, 1784. Although employed in youth in agricultural labour, he gave himself a liberal education, entered Yale College in 1809, and graduated in 1811. For some years a teacher at Salem, Massachusetts, he gave his life thereafter to continued literary labours down to its close at Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 27, 1865. All his works were laborious, but most of them unhappily ephemeral: gazetteers, manuals of geography and history, the American Almanac (1832-43). He prepared an edition of Chalmers' abridgment of Todd's Johnson's Dictionary, together with Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary (1828), abridged Webster (1829), and printed his sound and sensible Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary (1830; enlarged ed. 1855). His Universal and Critical Dictionary followed in 1846; his great quarto Dictionary of the English Language in 1860.