If webster wrote the first dictionary... where did he find the words?

He found the words from people, who used to speak all around him. He gathered those words, and compiled his dictionary. He also referenced newspapers of the day, and used books to look into meanings and common and proper usages.If webster wrote the first dictionary... where did he find the words?
Noah Webster compiled the first dictionary of American English, the first edition of which was published in 1806.



But Samuel Johnson compiled the first commonly used English dictionary, published in 1755.



So it's highly probably that Webster "found" many of his words in Johnson's dictionary. Webster can, however, take sole responsibility for many of the differences in spellings between American and British English: he just decided that he liked other spellings and altered his dictionary accordingly



As for where Johnson got his words, he and his assistants spent some nine years collecting words from hundreds of books, deciding on definitions and sorting the words into alphabetical order.