Just to work from "A" to "ant" took the original Oxford English Dictionary team around 10 years. They thought they'd reach "Z" in that time — but gathering definitions for hundreds of thousands of ...

In 1789, Noah Webster wrote something radical. “There is to be no elite in America, no linguistic differentiation between classes and regions.” No, he wasn’t one of the Founding Fathers. He’s the ...

Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806. His 1828 follow-up contained 70,000 entries. By 1864, the collection had 114,000 ...

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Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. An Object Lesson. That symbolic importance is summed up in the phrase ...