G. & C. Merriam Company
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| Parent company | Encyclopædia Britannica |
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| Founded | 1831 |
| Founder | George Merriam, Charles Merriam |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Springfield, Massachusetts |
| Publication types | Reference books, online dictionaries |
| Official website | www |
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially known for its dictionaries.
In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the company as G & C Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, after Noah Webster died, the company bought the rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language from Webster's estate. All Merriam-Webster dictionaries trace their lineage to this source.
In 1964, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. acquired Merriam-Webster, Inc. as a subsidiary. The company adopted its current name in 1982.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, . In 1807 Webster started two decades of intensive work to expand his publication into a fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language. To help him trace the etymology of words, Webster learned 26 languages. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country used somewhat different vocabularies and spelled, pronounced, and used words differently.
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, and at the University of Cambridge. His 1820s book contained 70,000 words, of which about 12,000 had never appeared in a dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing colour with color, waggon with wagon, and centre with center. He also added American words, including skunk and squash, that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of 70 in 1828, Webster published his dictionary; it sold poorly, with only 2,500 copies putting him in debt. However, in 1840, he published the second edition in two volumes with much greater success.
Author and poet Nathan W. Austin explores the intersection of lexicographical and poetic practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's dictionaries as a base. He shows ways that American poetry inherited Webster's ideas and draws on his lexicography to develop the language. Austin explicates key definitions from the Compendious (1806) and American (1828) dictionaries, and expresses various concerns, including the politics of American English, the question of national identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, and the poetics of citation and definition.
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