Webster, Noah | American English as it is spoken

Webster, Noah

Autograph Manuscript, a leaf from the first edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language

2pp., 4to (140 x 200 mm). 32 lines total written recto and verso, with a dozen cancellations and edits, defining the preposition "Behind" in 6 instances, with examples of their usage, the verso defining the adjective "Behind Hand." In cloth case with a typed transcription.

A working manuscript from the most important American dictionary.

A remarkable record of Webster's process, herein he defines "behind" in one instance as "inferior to another in dignity or excellence" and uses 2 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 5 as an example, "For I suppose I was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles."

His second definition is the now little known "behind hand" which Webster finds means "a state of poverty" in popular use, in arrear or in an exhausted state in more formal use. He goes on to record that it should never precede the noun and therefore Shakespeare's phrase "behind hand slackness" is "according to present usage not a legitimate phrase."

Webster wrote out by hand the more than 70,000 entries for "the most ambitious publication ever undertaken, up to that time, upon American soil." Proclaimed a born lexicographer by Sir James Murray (editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), Webster "succeeded in breaking the fetters imposed upon American English by Johnson, to the ultimate benefit of the living languages of both countries" (PMM).

REFERENCE:

Grolier/American 36; Printing & the Mind of Man 291; Sabin 102335; Skeel 583 (all for the 1828 first edition)