October 16, the birthday of Noah Webster, is Dictionary Day in America, born on this date in 1758. Lovers of big words know the 250th anniversary has a number of proposed names—semiquincentennial and bicenquinquagenary come to mind. Students of dictionaries know those terms aren't assured a place in the record books because they are not firmly established in the lexicon. And we know we'd rather talk about dictionaries and Noah Webster than about sesquipedalian words.
Old Noah was a bit of a visionary when it came to creating his dictionaries. He believed people living in the young United States had their own lexicon worth honoring, and he believed in simplifying pesky spelling issues. Some, but not all, of his spelling reforms caught on with the public. He argued that wimmen was the "old and true spelling" of women and the spelling that best indicates its pronunciation. That change didn't take, although his efforts to eliminate the u from mould and honour did succeed.
250 years after Noah Webster's birth, and 202 years after his first dictionary was published, the American lexicon continues to change and grow. Noah Webster's 1828 magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, defined 70,000 words. The most recent edition of the Collegiate Dictionary has more than 225,000 definitions . . . and the lexicon shows no signs of stopping its growth.
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