Note on "1844 Addenda to Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (ADEL)"

With reference to the recent article by Cynthia L. Hallen and Dallin J. Bailey, "1844 Addenda to Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (ADEL)," Dictionaries 30 (2009): 23-94, Professor Edwin A. Miles has commented on the Supplement which appeared in the edition of ADEL published by J. S. and C. Adams in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1844, the year after Webster died. As Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel notes in A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster (New York: New York Public Library, 1958), the edition of 1844 "is made up from unsold sheets of the 1841 edition" — "[e]xcept for the addenda," comprising the Supplement, which was new (Skeel 587, p. 239). Professor Miles remarks that some copies of the 1841 edition also include the Supplement — for example, four copies in the Edwin A. Miles Historic Dictionaries Collection, now in the University of Houston Libraries. Because Webster was still working on the Supplement in May 1843, these copies must have been bound up and sold after then, using the old title page of 1841. Professor Miles also points out that the edition originally issued in 1841 included a section of addenda at the end of the second volume (pp. [985]-1004; Skeel 586, p. 237). This section was displaced in the Amherst edition of 1844 (and also, as he notes, in some copies of "1841") by the more extensive Supplement (pp. [985]-1020; Skeel 587). Evidently Skeel did not know about the variant states of the edition of 1841. — Editor, with thanks to Michael Hancher for elucidating some bibliographical detail.

Professor Hallen comments: For me the value of the 1844 ADEL is that it contains the 1841 second edition in its body, and in its addenda contains the last words that Noah himself worked on before his death. I value this edition because it shows Webster's lexicography before the Merriam Brothers editions began making major revisions, substitutions, and updates. As a philologist, I am particularly interested in Webster's prematurely and unfairly maligned etymologies, which are a major early example of the comparative method that revolutionalized language studies and the other sciences, leading to the development of the field of contemporary linguistics. My co-author Dallin D. Oaks has obtained microfilms from the New York Public Library of Webster's working papers, in which he compared the cognates and origins of words in twenty different languages. This is another long-neglected Webster contribution that must come to light and receive its due commendation.