Webster's Dictionaries In The Works Of Noah Webster

In chapter ten, author Jack Lynch spends vast majority of his time walking through the the evolution of dictionaries and the criticism behind them. Throughout this entry, one of the most discussed dictionaries was Webster’s dictionaries, which were published by a man named Noah Webster. However, when Webster had passed away in 1843 his dictionary was takeover and edited through a man by the name of Philip Gove. Gove came along to add thousands of different words that had seemed to be used more frequently than the words which he found to have died off in the past decade or so. What made Webster 's dictionary so extraordinary wasn 't the amount of words that the dictionary composed of or the complexity of the words themselves, but instead on how modernized the linguistics and the words of the dictionary were, mainly because of the works of Gove.

Although the modernization of the dialect found throughout Webster 's dictionary was more convenient to many individuals, especially those of the working class, many others thought that the revision of the dictionary had caused it to lose its purpose. To many traditionalists the function of grammar was not to be “real,” but instead to serve a purpose in telling the truth about language. However, what’s to be the truth about language? How do you collect every known word, decide between competing spellings, reflect shades of meaning, separate faddish uses from the ones that will endure, and so on? It is dictionary makers who have to confront most directly the dilemma of Lynch’s title. Is their job to tell people how the language should be used, or to reflect how it actually is