as 13 million people, Webster showed astonishing clairvoyance with this statement. It has been my aim in this work, now offered to my fellow citizens, to ascertain the true principles of the language, in its orthography and structure to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consistency of forms, both of words and sentences and in this manner, to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.Ĭonsidering that the census of 1830 listed the population of the U.S. With that in mind, it’s remarkable to note that Webster went on to make an extraordinary prediction: In 1828, the United States was still a new and fragile country-far from a world power. But ultimately, the choice of which spellings to adopt is made in the most democratic way possible: by public use and acceptance. Noah Webster's famous dictionary, published on this day in 1828, shaped what we now consider American spelling.
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