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English settlers arrived in the New World in the very early seventeenth century at four points: Cuper’s Cove in Newfoundland (1610), St George’s in Bermuda (1612), the Jamestown Colony of Virginia (1607), and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628). They were not prepared for what they found, neither materially nor lexically. For instance, what Spaniards called maize, New Englanders called Indian corn; but they borrowed the Native American word hominy for corn reduced to grits and cooked for food. Common American English terms for flora and fauna are reanalysed versions of Native American words: persimmon and hickory, quahog and raccoon. Settlers often borrowed Native American names for places they settled, from the Abagadasset River in Massachusetts (now Maine) to Yokum in the same commonwealth’s Berkshire County. By the end of the century, native-born descendants of English settlers would establish backlog and bull frog as distinctively American English, and while the insular English drew lots to determine allotted roles, played the lots ‘lottery’, and paid lots ‘taxes’, their American cousins were dividing land up into lots in a new sense of the word as early as 1633.

Settlers and their descendants, as well as visitors, noticed the new words right away. Captain John Smith, who helped to found Jamestown, first recorded raugroughcum or raccoon in 1608. Opossum/possum and moose were not far behind. But while American vocabulary accumulated, some saw corruption in ways Americans declared their independence of insular English usage. As often happened in the history of English lexicography, a Scot, the Reverend John Witherspoon led the way. Fifteen years after he arrived in New Jersey to become president of the College of New Jersey – later Princeton University – Witherspoon contributed a series of essays critical of American usage to the Pennsylvania Journal and The Weekly Advertiser (1781). Some already patriotic Americans responded with letters in favour of American English. The Reverend Jonathon Boucher, similarly disapproving, avoided controversy, because bits of his eighteenth-century Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words were published posthumously (1807 and 1832).

After the War of Independence and gradual stabilisation of the American Republic, people recognised, not just American words, phrases, and usage, but a national language – propose a national ideology, and dictionaries are not far behind. One of the earliest was John Pickering’s A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816). But a Connecticut patriot, Noah Webster, first attempted a systematic approach to American English in his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806). Critics rejected it; Webster was not cowed. He laboured for another two decades and more before he published the first great American dictionary.

Noah Webster, the Brothers Merriam, and the First War of the Dictionaries

Webster wrote his dictionaries – as do all who write dictionaries – in a specific cultural and political environment. ‘Americans of his day were obsessed with the idea of an independence from Britain complete not merely in a political sense, but in every sense. Extremists advocated the adoption of an utterly different language’ (Leavitt 1947, 13). English prevailed, however, and Webster was central to recording and stabilising an American variety of that language, especially in his monumental two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), with some 70,000 entries, covering not only basic English vocabulary, but Americanisms, new technical terms, and Webster’s one coinage, demoralize, which is, of course, familiar today.

The American Dictionary is an American classic, the foundation of American general lexicography and a model for other lexicographers, even British ones, like John Ogilvie, whose similarly two-volume Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological (1847–50) was based on Webster’s last revision (1841) of his dictionary. Webster’s definitions are notably clear and precise. James Murray, chief editor of the OED, called Webster ‘a born definer of words’. Webster explained words key to developing American institutions and culture in expansive entries – law, for instance, admits twenty-six senses, including ‘Municipal or civil laws are established by the decrees, edicts or ordinances of absolute princes, as emperors and kings, or by the formal acts of the legislatures of free states. Law therefore is sometimes equivalent to decree, edict, or ordinance’, which articulates distinctively American political experience.

One cannot overlook some deficiencies in Webster’s work. He resisted the New Philology, which articulated the relations among many unexpectedly connected Indo-European languages, and was himself given to ‘fantastic speculations, devoid of any save that of historical curiosity’ (Landau 2001, 71), sometimes tracing words back to supposed origins in Chaldean, a Semitic rather than Indo-European language. Webster was an ardent spelling reformer, and the American Dictionary incorporated many doomed Websterian spellings – he liked to remove unnecessary letters, preferring bred to bread, for instance. Later editions of Webster’s 1841 dictionary adopted conventional spellings and sounder etymological principles.

The American Dictionary – large and expensive – had limited distribution, but from the outset Webster expected to produce an abridged version, which was published in 1829 as an affordable octavo volume and immediately transformed an iconic national dictionary into a democratic one. A decade later, Webster embarked on the wholesale revision published in 1841, ‘under the title An American Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Edition, Corrected and Enlarged, but it soon became almost universally known by the popular name of Webster’s Unabridged’ (Leavitt 1947, 36), and we call Merriam-Webster’s big dictionaries – even the online edition – by that name to this day.

After Webster died, George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the American Dictionary. Masters of stereotyped printing, which was especially cost-effective for very large print runs of school books, the Bible, etc., the Merriams saw the potential in dictionary sales. They engaged Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich of Yale College, Webster’s son-in-law and literary executor, as chief editor of a one-volume, newly revised and enlarged edition – it contained some 85,000 entries – published in 1847, which proved as successful as the Merriams had hoped. Yet, the next decade would prove turbulent, with the eruption of the infamous war of the dictionaries.

Joseph E. Worcester, though a critic of Webster’s spelling reforms, had compiled the Abridged dictionary of 1829 under Webster’s supervision. When he published Worcester’s Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary (1830), Webster accused him of plagiarism, he responded with further criticism, people took sides, and ‘by the time Worcester’s Universal and Critical Dictionary appeared in 1846 there were all the makings of a first-class fracas’ (Leavitt 1947, 53). Worcester fuelled the controversy with subsequent editions, and Dictionary of the English Language (1860), with 104,000 or so entries, remained Webster’s chief competitor for decades, yet the Merriams effectively won the war – the attention brought by endless press battles drove sales through the roof. Still, the so-called war alerted Goodrich and the Merriam brothers against complacency, and even though the United States found itself on the eve of the Civil War, they devised plans to put Worcester behind them once and for all.

Late Nineteenth-Century American Lexicography

Worcester’s last dictionary was widely praised in the press upon its publication in 1860 (Friend 1967, 96) and prominent twentieth-century scholars such as George Phillip Krapp (1925, I, 371–2) who, in his English Language in America, judged it better than Webster’s on many points. But its quality was not the only issue. During the 1850s, Worcester had added encyclopaedic material and illustrations to new editions of the Universal and Critical Dictionary, and with each successive printing of its dictionary, Merriam-Webster titted for those tats, but it needed a thorough revision, one that replaced Webster’s etymologies according to much improved knowledge of comparative Indo-European philology. Worcester had improved on Webster by providing restrained etymologies and some cognate forms, not exceeding his relatively limited knowledge. Goodrich, the Merriams, and Webster’s heirs settled on Goodrich’s chief assistant, Noah Porter, to take the reins, and Porter convinced them all to hire the prominent German etymologist C. A. F. Mahn to write etymologies for the new edition from scratch.

The new work, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Royal Quarto Edition (1864), known in professional shorthand as ‘Webster-Mahn’, established a dictionary lineage that would last nearly a century, and that most Americans believed set the standard of American lexicography. Although there were intermediate printings with sections of new entries appended at the dictionary’s end, the next full revision, Webster’s International Dictionary was published in 1890, again under Porter’s leadership. The wordlist had expanded to 175,000 items, around 56,000 more than in Webster-Mahn. Webster’s New International Dictionary (1909), edited by William T. Harris, had grown to 400,000 entries. Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1934) was Merriam-Webster’s most ambitious undertaking ever, with a staff of more than 300 – not all of them in Springfield, Massachusetts – and at a cost of $1,300,000, or, in 2018, nearly $25,000,000. Led by William Allan Neilson, President of Smith College, with daily operations directed by Thomas A. Knott and Paul W. Carhart, etymologies revised by Harold H. Bender of Princeton University, and 12,000 or so illustrations revised by H. Downing Jacobs, the printed dictionary comprised roughly 552,000 entries. It was so monumental, and so well respected, that the next revision, Webster’s Third (1961) was rejected by many American dictionary users – indeed, some resistance continues in the twenty-first century.

Merriam-Webster may have won the war against Worcester, but it faced bracing competition, nonetheless, principally from Funk & Wagnalls, a well-established New York publisher that brought out its Standard Dictionary of the English Language in 1893, edited by one of the firm’s owners, Isaac Funk. The Standard Dictionary included 304,000 entries, far outpacing the size of Webster’s International, published just three years earlier. After years of head-to-head competition, Funk & Wagnalls published its New Standard Dictionary in 1913, with 450,000 entries, still ahead of Merriam-Webster’s flagship dictionary. The Standard and New Standard ‘introduced lasting changes in dictionary practice’, that ‘mark[ed] the maturity of the unabridged as a genre’ (Landau 2001, 86). For instance, rather than organise entries with senses in historical order, Funk & Wagnalls listed them from most common to most specialised. Etymologies, formerly placed at the beginnings of entries, were demoted to their ends – definitions and pronunciations mattered more to dictionary users than word histories. Merriam-Webster would win this market skirmish when it published Webster’s Second, but Funk & Wagnall’s challenging performance no doubt prompted that colossal effort.

American Dictionaries at School and University

Merriam-Webster had developed a series of school dictionaries in the mid-nineteenth century, but publication of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1898) extended the school tradition into American colleges and universities. Funk & Wagnalls entered this market with the College Standard Dictionary (1922), edited by Frank H. Vizetelly. But after World War II, when many men matriculated at colleges and universities, funded by the GI Bill of 1944, the demand for college dictionaries expanded tremendously (for a full treatment, see Landau 2009). Funk & Wagnalls seized the opportunity with a second edition of the College Standard (1947), supervised by Charles Earle Funk. Soon after publication of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1951) followed a college edition (1953), both edited by David B. Guralnik and Joseph H. Friend. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, as it is now called, entered its fifth edition in 2016, while Webster’s Collegiate has reached an eleventh edition, first published in 2003. These dictionaries, as well as their ‘parents’, are usually updated in intermediate printings or continuously online.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the psychologist Edward L. Thorndike applied what we knew then about childhood learning to construct word books and dictionaries, producing a series of ‘Thorndike-Century’ dictionaries for different levels of education, from the beginning – precisely, American grades three to five – to a ‘senior’ dictionary for high-school students. These works were forward looking. In later editions of the 1950s and 1960s, he was joined by Clarence L. Barnhart, whose contribution was so considerable that the series was re-named ‘Thorndike-Barnhart’. Barnhart had become famous immediately after World War II as chief editor of yet another of the spate of college dictionaries, the American College Dictionary (1947). In fact, it was the first of them to reach the bookstores and so captured an unexpectedly large share of the growing market. Unlike its competitors, the American College Dictionary was built to be itself, rather than abridged and adapted from a larger dictionary.

Eventually, all the major American dictionary publishers offered college and school dictionaries and thesauri. Such dictionaries introduced young people to dictionary brands but also – except for the American College Dictionary – capitalised on each signature dictionary, making the most of the research and writing that had gone into it. Of course, students needed dictionaries, but college dictionaries were so affordable, they insinuated that everyone ought to own at least two dictionaries, a small one in college – a desk reference – and an unabridged one to go along with the white picket fence. As material objects, dictionaries signified status within the American class system in the so-called post-war period. The extent to which they will continue to do so remains to be seen (see Adams 2018).

The Second War of the Dictionaries: Webster’s Third and its Adversaries

Backlash over publication of Webster’s Third (1961) proved the significance of dictionaries in American culture, regardless of the merits of the public criticism or Merriam-Webster’s defence. Academic views of language changed considerably in the first half of the twentieth century, marked by the rise of linguistics as a discipline, punctuated in 1933 with publication of Leonard Bloomfield’s Language. Though published in 1934, Webster’s Second might be considered the last great nineteenth-century dictionary and the apotheosis of the Merriam-Webster dictionary tradition. Many people – both Merriam-Webster insiders and members of the American dictionary-reading audience – saw no reason to challenge that tradition. Merriam-Webster was the dictionary brand Americans could rely on for sound information about American English words and sound advice about usage.

When Philip Babcock Gove succeeded John Bethel as general editor of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, he resolved to build the next edition of the big dictionary on linguistic principles. Thus, Webster’s Third benefited from more systematic approaches to etymology, pronunciation, and defining. For instance, Edward Artin, the pronunciation editor, went into the field and recorded speech, so that he could identify the range of American pronunciations, rather than merely represent the ‘general American’ norm, and he included variant pronunciations in entries, suggesting, for the first time in the history of American lexicography, that a dictionary’s job was to record language facts rather than render judgement about usage. If people across America pronounced a word differently, then dictionary users should know that and should also stop assuming that one pronunciation – the supposedly ‘standard’ pronunciation – was better than the others, ‘correct’ where the others were incorrect.

Gove and his associates introduced descriptive linguistics into the prescriptive public discourse about English usage. Descriptivists believe that linguists, lexicographers, and teachers should describe how we speak or write, not the way we should speak or write. Prescriptivists believe that some authority must propose and regulate what is standard or correct and what is not. So, they were naturally shocked when Gove announced the consensus among linguists: language is constantly changing; change is normal (that is, not something to worry about or resist); spoken English, not written English, constitutes ‘the’ language; correctness depends on how people actually speak; and usage is relative, due to regional, gender, and class identities, among others. Dividing the world into descriptivists and prescriptivists is unhelpfully reductive; ultimately it proves a red herring in arguments about usage and language authority. Yet, prescriptivists in 1961 took Webster’s Third and the principles on which it was founded as an act of culture war.

A chapter of this size cannot dig into the fascinating details of the Webster’s Third story, neither what actually changed from Webster’s Second to Webster’s Third, nor what people said or assumed had changed. Two fine books, Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (1994) and David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published (2012), leave no stone unturned and, refreshingly, take different perspectives on Gove’s method and the controversy. Skinner puts ain’t into his title because, supposedly, Webster’s Third had entered it for the first time, thus legitimating it, and, by not labelling it as substandard, proposed it as acceptable American English. The first supposition was false, the second closer to true. Some people objected to Merriam-Webster’s apparent permissiveness, expecting a dictionary to uphold usage standards. Journalists had a field day: ‘Good English Ain’t What We Thought’, ‘Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong’, and ‘Say It “Ain’t” So!’ were sample headlines upon the dictionary’s release. Another headline, ‘But What’s a Dictionary For?’, asked the fundamental question.

One captures the majority journalistic response to Webster’s Third succinctly in just such headlines. Suddenly, under the influence of linguistics, Merriam-Webster was too hip to slang: ‘Dig Those Words’ and ‘Webster’s Way Out Dictionary’, said the headlines. Suddenly, under the influence of linguistics, time-honoured laws of usage were overturned – ‘100,000 Words Become Legal’ – and the whole point of language condemned – ‘The Death of Meaning’ – the language markets were upended – ‘Logomachy – Debased Verbal Currency’ – and institutions went up in flames – ‘Anarchy in Language’. ‘Keep Your Old Webster’s’, The Washington Post advised, because, one editorial claimed, ‘New Dictionary Cheap, Corrupt’. One critic scolded the mere ‘Ruckus in the Reference Room’, while another returned to the metaphors of dictionary wars with ‘Sabotage in Springfield’. Those on the side of Webster’s Third came up with such gems as ‘Linguistic Advances and Lexicography’, ‘English as It’s Used Belongs in Dictionary’, ‘Webster Editor Disputes Critics; Says New Dictionary Is Sound’, ‘A Lexicon for the Scientific Era’, and ‘The Lexicographer’s Uneasy Chair’. We know who won the war of the headlines. In theirs, opponents of Webster’s Third essentially declared the second war of the dictionaries, though there were no dictionaries ready to fight against Merriam-Webster’s permissiveness at the time. That would soon change.

James Parton, president of the American Heritage publishing company, had tried to buy Merriam-Webster in 1959, but failed. Whatever the merits of Webster’s Third – and there are many – the incendiary response to it, however unfair, opened the American dictionary market to alternatives. Parton hired William Morris – who had once been a Merriam-Webster salesman – to produce an American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language that could step into the prescriptive role Merriam-Webster had disavowed in Webster’s Third. Whereas Webster’s Third was irresponsibly permissive, the American Heritage Dictionary would advise on usage, even if it did not prescribe it. And it would not do so capriciously, but with the help of a ‘usage panel’ whose opinions would supposedly inform some five hundred usage notes, a veritable dictionary of usage incorporated in the dictionary’s general and otherwise utterly conventional structure. Webster’s Third came under attack, too, because its definitions were complex, single sentences of a pattern that would not, it turned out, fit all words equally well. The American Heritage Dictionary definitions were written with its audience in mind, rather than on semantic principles. The dictionary also included an appendix of Proto-Indo-European roots – written by Harvard University professor Calvert Watkins – and when appropriate referred to it in entry-level etymologies.

The American Heritage Dictionary was no flash in the pan; its fifth edition – probably the last to appear in print – was published in 2011. It broadened the sense among Americans of what a dictionary can do and presented its users with lexical and usage information missing in other dictionaries. Gradually, however, as it added new encyclopaedic features – word history notes, ‘our living language’ notes, and regional notes – and revised its structure, it became a nearly descriptive dictionary, much more like Webster’s Third, the dictionary it was meant to challenge, than its own first edition (Adams 2015). Interestingly, the Merriam-Webster dictionaries gradually inserted usage and word history notes into their dictionaries, as with Worcester a century earlier, beating competitors by absorbing their best ideas and practices.

Other dictionary programmes – like the Webster’s New World line, published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio – entered the expanding and diversifying American dictionary market. The American College Dictionary was wildly successful, and Random House decided to base yet another competitor, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966), edited by Jess Stein and Laurence Urdang, on it. The big Random House dictionary was not a reaction to Webster’s Third – editing began in the mid-1950s – but it certainly benefited from the temporary hobbling of Webster’s thoroughbred unabridged, and its introduction remarks on how the Random House dictionary navigates the impasse between the Scylla and Charybdis of doctrinaire descriptivism and prescriptivism. Random House’s process was unusual and worth noting. Generally, college and school dictionaries are cut-down versions of large, if not unabridged, parent dictionaries. Before the Random House dictionary, no one had built a big dictionary up from a college dictionary. Random House was also the first dictionary to rely on computers for parts of the editing and production processes. The 1960s, given the controversy over Webster’s Third and the market created by the controversy, marked the onset of an American dictionary heyday that would last into the twenty-first century.

American Historical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionaries of American English

The OED has dominated the world of historical dictionaries of English since its completion. For a while, the ten-volume Century Dictionary (1889–95), also a dictionary made on historical principles, was its chief competition. The great Sanskrit scholar William Dwight Whitney of Yale, the college and ultimately university that supplied so many Merriam-Webster editors, conceived it and led the project to its completion. Unfortunately, it has been so long out of print that America’s quite successful attempt at a general English historical dictionary goes largely unremembered. The Century is a remarkable dictionary and has been beautifully accounted for – conception, typography, etymology, definitions and usage, pronunciation, illustration, and influence – in a special section of an issue of the journal Dictionaries (Chisholm 1996). But, while the Century was America’s answer to the OED, it was not a historical dictionary of American English.

In 1919, William A. Craigie, one of the OED’s editors, proposed several historical dictionary schemes to the Philological Society of London, among them a dictionary of American English. He left England for the University of Chicago to make that dictionary, the Dictionary of American English (DAE), in 1925; it began to appear in a series of twenty fascicles in 1936 and was published in four volumes from 1938–44. Craigie was one of the most experienced and prominent anglophone lexicographers in the world, yet Americans noted immediately the strange proposition that a Scot from England was best qualified to compile a dictionary of American English. It was a rare post-colonial moment, and the American editors sometimes resisted Craigie’s been-knighted imperial authority (Adams 1998) to the last line of Z.

DAE ignores much American English. As Craigie explained in the preface to the first volume, the dictionary could not include all English used in America – it would have taken forever to collect the information and another forever to write entries and see them into print, in total something like the amount of time and labour that went into the OED. The more modest DAE focused on Americanisms, senses of words unique to America, words and uses more common in America than in England, and ‘every word denoting something which has a real connection with the development of the country and the history of its people’, the last an incoherent criterion. DAE includes next to no slang and a limited selection of regionalisms, lapses that necessitated the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). DAE also imposed 1900 as a deadline for new words, though early twentieth-century quotations sometimes figured in entries for words well established in the nineteenth century. After 1900, much American English ensued, and DAE is now far behind the national language, a historical historical dictionary, so to speak.

A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951), edited by one of DAE’s assistant editors, Mitford M. Mathews, better stands the test of time. In two volumes, it is certainly more manageable than DAE. DAE had included and marked many Americanisms, but Mathews felt that the larger dictionary recorded them too sparingly. DAE included some 35,000 main entries – in fact covering many derivatives, phrases, sayings, etc., within those entries – and some 150,000 quotations, from more than 2,500 sources. By contrast, the Dictionary of Americanisms included 14,000 entries based on 100,000 quotations from 4,000 sources – Mathews saw the abundant evidence as culturally important; it distinguishes American from British and other Anglophone experience.

Both DAE and the Dictionary of Americanisms belong squarely to the tradition of anglophone historical lexicography established by the OED, and it is no surprise that Craigie packed that method in his luggage when he left England for Chicago – he was confident that one method fit all English vocabulary, regardless of place, culture, or history. DARE’s chief editor, Frederic G. Cassidy, claimed that DARE followed the OED’s example, too, but the claim was true only to a point. Cassidy had worked on the Middle English Dictionary and Early Modern English Dictionary projects – the latter was barely begun and never finished – both conceived originally as period supplements to the OED. But Cassidy’s vision of DARE was very different from the OED.

First, Cassidy and his colleagues quoted a wider array of material than the OED and other historical dictionaries. Because newspapers are mostly local – disregard the handful of national newspapers of record, like the New York Times – they well support the quest for regional words, so are more prominent in DARE. Then, he also quoted scholarship on the pronunciations or regional distributions of words, or field guides to describe flora and fauna, practices eschewed by other historical dictionaries. DARE is a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary. Between 1965 and 1970, Cassidy and a team of fieldworkers administered a questionnaire with 1,847 questions meant to elicit regional usage to 2,777 informants in 1,002 communities across America, and the pinpoint responses appear in many entries, an unusual stream of information within a dictionary text.

DARE illustrates the regional distribution of certain words on computer-generated maps reconfigured according to population density rather than political geography, which thus presents readers with a new America, or, at least, a different way of understanding the old one. DARE contains 3,000 of those maps, accompanying 60,000 headwords and senses across 5,544 pages in five volumes, with a sixth volume devoted to apparatus, all published between 1985 and 2013. Few historical dictionaries have captured public imagination as surely as DARE – lionised in the press, admired by the academy, funded by foundations and interested individuals, it is a democratic dictionary, a dictionary of the people in which lots of people participated. It speaks in American voices of underlying American ideologies.

Twilight of the American Dictionary

In the twenty-first century, America mostly stopped making new dictionaries: Random House closed its dictionary office in 2002; Houghton Mifflin discontinued the focused American Heritage editorial programme in 2018. These dictionaries will be revised; new editions will appear. But the publishers depend on loose teams of freelance lexicographers to do the work. They are dictionaries without vision now, rote exercises in reference publishing, lacking any specifically American perspective, dictionaries outside of the cultural argument. Oxford University Press may still be in the game, but the New Oxford American Dictionary’s most recent edition appeared in 2001 – seventeen years (at this writing) is a long interval between editions of such a dictionary. Only Merriam-Webster is committed existentially to producing American dictionaries for the general commercial market.

Similarly, academic dictionaries are less well funded than in the past – what foundation today would accept responsibility for a several decades long project like DARE? DARE relied heavily on the National Endowment for the Humanities, but its editors could not find enough patrons to support a post-2013 research programme, so the online edition cannot benefit from continual revision in the way of the OED and Merriam-Webster’s current Unabridged. DARE has inspired other historical dictionaries of regional American English, notably Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall’s Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (2004). Perhaps, the future of American lexicography depends on making dictionaries of that scope and kind, or within the dictionary domains left out of this chapter.

Of course, there are Web-based dictionaries now – Wordnik, for instance, and dictionary.com. These sites are destinations for word lovers and include a lot more than definitions and the like, the things one expects to find in print dictionaries. So does Merriam-Webster online. But Merriam-Webster is a dictionary programme that has adapted to the online environment, not an online enterprise anchored by a dictionary. Such online dictionaries may be based in the United States, but they are American dictionaries in the sense that Amazon is an American business. They are not acts of patriotism; they are not partisans in the culture wars. It will be interesting to see how long Merriam-Webster – the through line of Americanness in American dictionaries – can endure.