From his start with the speller and his sputtering law practice, Webster went on to edit New York City’s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, expressly at the behest of George Washington. When Webster retired from the newspaper business, he moved back to Connecticut—to New Haven, where he bought the Benedict Arnold House (it was going cheap)—and turned to compiling an American dictionary. Benjamin Franklin, who was already in his eighties when he befriended Webster, and who advocated spelling reform, had encouraged the younger man to adopt his ideas. Franklin proposed that we lose c, w, y, and j; modify a and u to represent their different sounds; and adopt a new form of s for sh and a variation on y for ng as well as tweak the h of th to distinguish the sounds of “thy” and “thigh,” “swath” and “swathe.” If Franklin had had his way, he would have been the Saint Cyril of America—Cyril “perfected” the Greek alphabet for the Russian language; hence the Cyrillic alphabet—and American English would look like Turkish.
Webster went along with him to an extent, but Franklin had brought to America the standard grammar text for students—Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue—buying the rights and profiting from sales, and it was Dilworth’s that Webster was hoping to supersede. Early on, he was an advocate of dropping silent letters. One of his books was titled A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings. Traditionalists have always been against this kind of simplification, on the ground that there is so much history in spelling: clues to a word’s etymology, its radical meaning in Latin or Greek, German or Basque or Anglo-Saxon. Before the two-volume dictionary that was the capstone of Webster’s career, he put out a Compendious dictionary, in 1806, in which he experimented with phonetic spellings. Compendious sounds heavy, ponderous, but the dictionary defines it as “concise and comprehensive.” The Compendious gave brief definitions of 37,000 words in a single volume, with no etymologies or citations of usage. (For instance, “skunk: a quadruped remarkable for its smell.”) On the title page Webster wrote, “The ORTHOGRAPHY is, in some instances, corrected.” Some of his innovations caught on: the British “gaol” in America became “jail,” thank God. (I still can’t look at Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” without thinking that it has something unpleasant to do with gall and reading—not that I am suggesting we change it to Redding Jail.) He took the u out of “mould.” (Now, there’s an epitaph!) But many of Webster’s attempts to make the orthography match the pronunciation were not popular. One of his biographers, Harlow Giles Unger, writes, “Americans rejected ake for ache, hainous for heinous, soop for soup, cloke for cloak, and spunge for sponge. Efforts to eliminate silent letters had similarly mixed results. . . . [T]he public refused to adopt ax, imagin, medicin, doctrin, or wo, and Webster restored the final e’s in his subsequent dictionaries.” He also failed to persuade his countrymen that “tung” was an improvement over “tongue.”
In the end, Webster’s spelling reforms seem conservative. He eliminated the u in the British spelling of such words as “colour” and “flavour.” He took the k off the end of words like “musick” and “traffick,” rejecting a spelling preferred by Samuel Johnson. (Johnson was a hero of Webster’s, and he did copy from Johnson—why reinvent the wheel?—but he left out the dirty bits.) He changed c to s in “defense” and “offense,” and transposed the re into er in such words as “theater” and “center.” Other reforms came from the people, who were already spelling words like “masque” and “risque” and “racquet” with a k instead of a qu.
Before writing the dictionary, Webster spent an entire decade kneading the language. He had a semicircular desk with two dozen dictionaries and had studied twenty-six languages—Latin, Greek, French, German, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Norwegian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit among them—and he would turn from one dictionary to another, tracing the words back to a common source in what he called Chaldee, the universal language spoken before the time of the Tower of Babel. (Webster was a born-again Christian, enamored of biblical truth.) The idea of consulting etymology in order to arrive at a word’s authentic spelling is a sound one. The trouble was that Webster was making it up.
“Etymology” is from the Greek and means the study (logia) of the “literal meaning of a word according to its origin” (etymon). (Not to be confused with “entomology,” the study of insects [entomon].) It can be a huge help in spelling. For instance, people sometimes misspell “iridescent.” It’s a trick word that often appears on copy-editing tests. Webster’s Collegiate supplies this enthusiastic definition for “iridescence”: “a lustrous rainbowlike play of color caused by differential refraction of light waves (as from an oil slick, soap bubble, or fish scales) that tends to change as the angle of view changes.” Rather than just try to memorize the spelling, if you look at the etymology—study the entrails of the word—you find that “iris, irid” is a combining form that comes from the Greek Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods. Wow! Like Webster, I could go off the deep end in finding significance in this: it seems like magic—a word that appeared in Homer’s Iliad and that we associate with Noah’s ark (the rainbow), and with optimism and promise, connects with puddles in Cleveland that I marveled at as a girl (there was a lot of grease in the puddles in Cleveland) and an indelible image from the opening pages of The Catcher in the Rye, in which Salinger has Holden remark on the “gasoline rainbow.” Anyway, once you know that “iridescent” comes from Iris, you’ll never spell it wrong.