The father of American English

Noah Webster (1758-1843) is said to have coined the term “American English”. Born into an average colonial American farming Family, he was described as an “arrogant, condescending, humorless and socially tone-deaf” man who “alienated and insulted his friends, political allies and potential professional contacts” according to this article in the New York Times.

Despite these characteristics, Webster was a patriot who thought that Americans should learn from American books. In his quest for this national identity, Webster wrote “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language”, in 1783, according to The Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society. The work was a compendium in three parts which included “The American Spelling Book”, a grammar book and a reader. It was one of the best sellers of its time, nicknamed the "Blue Backed Speller", and is estimated to have sold some 100 million copies.

It was used to teach American children how to spell for over 100 years. More may be read about the speller in this 1984 article by Sandra Tomkins for the McGill University Journal.

This work on American English was not enough for Webster, so in 1801 he decided to start working on his American English dictionaries. His first, the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1806 and included around 37,000 entries. He then went on to work on the “American Dictionary of the English Language”, publish in 1828 (22 years later), containing over 65,000 entries. This work would later become the defining dictionary of the American language and would grant him praise by Sir James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who called him a “born definer of words.”