| What do you do when you want to learn
the meaning of a {{U}}(21) {{/U}} word? If you're {{U}}(22)
{{/U}} most people, you do one of two things. You ask someone to tell you
the word's meaning, or you look {{U}}(23) {{/U}} the word in a
dictionary. The fact that you can look up words in a dictionary can be {{U}}(24) {{/U}} to a man named Noah Webster. He produced the first dictionary of American English. Noah Webster was a person who {{U}}(25) {{/U}} words. He was born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758. Webster studied at Yale and later became a teacher and a writer. In 1782 Webster was teaching at an elementary school in Goshen, New York. He saw that the schoolbooks he was using left {{U}}(26) {{/U}} something he felt was important. The books Webster {{U}}(27) {{/U}} to use in his teaching came from England. These books were just {{U}}(28) {{/U}} for teaching English children. But they paid no {{U}}(29) {{/U}} to American culture. Remember, the United States had only just {{U}}(30) {{/U}} its independence from England. Americans still educated their children the same way the British {{U}}(31) {{/U}} . Noah Webster wanted to give his students an education that was strongly {{U}}(32) {{/U}}. In writing his first dictionary, Webster was preparing for something grander. He had become familiar {{U}}(33) {{/U}}many different languages. He felt it was helpful and important to know where words came from their {{U}}(34) {{/U}} . He traveled in England and France {{U}}(35) {{/U}} research on the histories of English words. In 1807 he began to work on An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was seventy years old when he published the first {{U}}(36) {{/U}} of this important work in 1828. Webster wrote the dictionary completely {{U}}(37) {{/U}} hand. In those days people didn't have ballpoint pens, much {{U}}(38) {{/U}} typewriters. He had to use a quill pen, which was a feather with its thickest end {{U}}(39) {{/U}} into a point. This point was dipped in a bottle of ink in order to write. A writer using a quill pen had to dip the pen constantly to {{U}}(40) {{/U}} the ink. |