American Dictionary of the English Language

Updated January 10, 2015. (Added THOUSANDS of links for better navigation)

Includes Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary and a fully illustrated biography of Noah Webster.

This edition includes ALL the original over 70,000 entries with over 71,000 links to make navigating and finding words much easier.

We have painstakingly navigated through all the words and sectioned them into chunks with additional links to each section.

Noah realized that England and the new United States had different forms of government, institutions, customs and laws. Because of this, he believed that they needed different vocabularies. He also knew that science and technology were developing rapidly, and new words were being introduced just as quickly. So, he spent over 25 years researching words and their origins and writing the first American dictionary. This dictionary helped Americans to feel pride in their new country, and enabled everyone across the new nation to have a standard vocabulary.

Webster's greatest achievement was the dictionary. In 1800 he published his intentions of writing a dictionary. He published a shortened, concise but comprehensive, version in 1806. The final version was finished in 1825 and published in 1828. It contained 70,000 words. It is no exaggeration to say that it was immediately accepted as the greatest dictionary of the English language on both sides of the Atlantic. Webster had an absolute genius for defining words.