The Predecessors of That Dictionary

Abstract

N OT SINCE THE Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in the seventeenth century has there been a greater furor in the world of letters than the controversy over Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Hardly had the dictionary been published in 1961 than it fell prey to the virulent attacks of reviewers in newspapers from the Louisville Times to the New York Times and in magazines from the American Bar Association Journal to the Saturday Review. The call to arms was quickly answered both at home and abroad by publishers, lexicographers, linguists, eminent literati, and by almost anyone with a concern for words. So grand was the foray that more than five years later it has not completely died, and it evokes disinterested commentary and excellent, dramatic chronicling as well. In brief, the controversy boils down to a hard offensive attack, by those who desire a prescriptive linguistic authority, upon the scientific descriptive method followed by the editors of the NID 3. In view of this, I should like to pose a question of causality in an historical context: What were the reactions of Americans to dictionaries published earlier in the century, specifically dictionaries on the same scale with the same publishers' excellent reputation, namely, the first and second editions of Webster's New International Dictionary ? Will an examination of these reactions show that the principles of the lexicographers have been corrupted, as the critics of the 1960s have charged, or that the criteria of the critics themselves have changed ? To answer this question, to discover what issues and principles were basic and important for the critics of 1909 and 1934, I have made a search of the reviews of the first and second editions of the NID. My study has been as