Friday, January 27, 2012

If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

Dictionary makers do spend a lot of time reading though. It’s how they find new words and new meanings for existing words. According to the Merriam-Webster website, their editors spend an hour or two a day just reading published materials such as magazines, newspapers, books, and electronic sources, and they make notes about anything interesting they find such as a new word, a different spelling of an existing word, or a word being used with a meaning that isn’t in the current dictionary (1). It’s these changes in the language of published material that dictionary makers consider when they are updating the dictionary.

If you want to see changes in the dictionary, you need to change the way words are used in published materials. For example, if multiple magazines start using “staycation,” and they use it over an extended period of time, and then dictionary editors start seeing it in newspaper and books, it’s likely “staycation” is going to show up in the dictionary. It can happen pretty quickly these days. “Staycation” is, in fact, in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, and they list its first known use in 2005. hope i helped :)If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?
:D

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He didn't write the first dictionary. He wrote America's first dictionary.



The first known one was written in ancient Summeria. The first English dictionary is generally attributed to Robert Cawdrey in the 1600s. He was a clergyman in England.



A dictionary doesn't make up words, it simply defines words.If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?
In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit.He had to learn a lot of languagesIf Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?
There were dictionaries prior to Webster, even in English. What Webster did mainly was to standardize spelling.
He didn't, it was Samuel Johnson in 1755

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