Websterisms: In Search of Noah's Headwords

Authors

Arthur Schulman

Abstract

Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) is a browser's paradise, revealing many words whose meaning has changed since Noah's time and others that lie idiosyncratically defined. I offer fifty of Webster's definitions below, and challenge the reader to guess the headwords that Webster was trying to define. To make the task more approachable, wordlengths are provided for the to-be-discovered headwords, which are listed in alphabetical order of their appearance in the dictionary. All of these headwords, if not Webster's definitions, should prove to be familiar to readers of Word Ways.

Recommended Citation

Schulman, Arthur (2009) "Websterisms: In Search of Noah's Headwords," Word Ways: Vol. 42 : Iss. 1 , Article 5.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol42/iss1/5