Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/65

 Webster's Dictionary 477 aware of the new movement. It was not until 1833 that Gess- ner Harrison received his materials upon it from George Long; not until 1839 that Salisbury brought it to Yale, where Webster might have had a chance to hear of it. Webster much enlarged Johnson's vocabulary, admitting a large number of technical terms which Johnson considered outside the classic pale. In this respect Webster's broad per- sonal experience as farmer, lawyer, teacher, editor, and pam- phleteer served him well. He was open-minded and meant his book to be serviceable to the common man. In spelling, though his fondness for analogy tended toward a logical schematism, he yet guarded his reforms in most cases by consulting usage, logic not logick, meter not metre, honor not honour, symbolize not symbolise. Webster's definitions are admittedly his forte. They are untinged with personal bias; they are proportioned in space to the importance of the word and the number of its meanings; and they are so phrased that generally they can be substituted for the word itself. Quotations it was Webster's policy to employ only ' ' to illustrate those definitions that are not entirely evident in sense" without them. Though in England Webster's Dictionary has not superseded Johnson's, it soon became the standard in the United States. The revision of 1847, conducted by Chauncey A. Goodrich, was authoritative. After the fourth edition, the so-called Pictorial, further revised by Goodrich but considered only provisional (1859), there appeared in 1864 the fifth edition, the first to be known as the Unabridged, a thorough recension by Goodrich (who died in i860) and by Noah Porter, with a staff which included C. A. F. Mahn of Berlin (who revised the etymologies), W. D. Whitney, James Dwight Dana, Daniel Coit Gilman, and James Hadley. This has been the basis of later revisions, gradually getting rid of some of its defects ; for instance, its unscholarly treatment of locutions like "had better," "had rather," and its derivation of "gonoph" from "gone off" ! The sixth edition (1890) — the International — was the result of the most "extensive and exhaustive revision that the Dictionary had received." In 1900 there was added a Supplement, still edited by Noah Porter, who had now associ- ated with himself WilHam Torrey Harris; and in 1909 the seventh edition — the New International — "entirely remade,"