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? 1.To comprehend the whole story ? Background information Background information 1. Noah Webster（1758—1843） Noah Webster: an American lexicographer, journalist, textbook author, advocate of cutural independence of the United States, translator of the Bible, an ardent federalist and spelling reformer. He was born at West Hartford,Connecticut, on the 16th of October 1758.A Yale graduate. He was descended from John Webster of Hartford who was Governor of Connecticut in 1656-1657 , and on his mothers side from Governor William Bradford of Plymouth. The Noah Webster House West Hartford Historical Society He holds that the spelling and grammar of a language must be based on actual usage rather than on artificial principles .And thus laid a foundation for the 20th century lexicography. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words:centre to center, and plough to plow etc. spelling reformer In 1806 Webster published A Compendious brief and concise Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. In order to research the origins of his own countrys tongue he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit梵语. Immediately The American Dictionary of the English Language ,his greatest work , was published in 1828, This book embodied a new standard of lexicography; it was a dictionary with 70,000 entries .12,000 words had not appeared in any other dictionaries before . Within one year ,all the 2,500 copies issued in American and the 3,000 copies in Britain were sold out. In 1840, The second edition was a failure. On Webster’s death in 1843 the unsold copies and publishing rights of his dictionary were acquired by George and Charles Merriam the two brothers , who in 1847 brought out a version edited by Noah Webster’s son-in-law, professor of Yale College. The 1847 edition became the first Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary. the G. C. Merriam Company probably the