Noah realized that England and the new United States had different forms of government, institutions, customs and laws. Because of this, he believed that they needed different vocabularies. He also knew that science and technology were developing rapidly, and new words were being introduced just as quickly. So, he spent over 25 years researching words and their origins and writing the first American dictionary. This dictionary helped Americans to feel pride in their new country, and enabled everyone across the new nation to have a standard vocabulary.
Webster's greatest achievement was the dictionary. In 1800 he published his intentions of writing a dictionary. He published a shortened, concise but comprehensive, version in 1806. The final version was finished in 1825 and published in 1828. It contained 70,000 words. It is no exaggeration to say that it was immediately accepted as the greatest dictionary of the English language on both sides of the Atlantic. Webster had an absolute genius for defining words.
This electronic edition is fully indexed. Using the standard search tool in your reader you can easily look up words.
