Joseph Emerson Worcester

Joseph Emerson Worcester (August 24, 1784 – October 27, 1865) was an American lexicographer who was the chief competitor to Noah Webster of Webster's Dictionary in the mid-nineteenth-century. Their rivalry became known as the "dictionary wars". Worcester's dictionaries focused on traditional pronunciation and spelling, unlike Noah Webster's attempts to Americanize words. Worcester was respected by American writers and his dictionary maintained a strong hold on the American marketplace until a later, posthumous version of Webster's book appeared in 1864. After Worcester's death in 1865, their war ended.

Worcester was born August 24, 1784, in Bedford, New Hampshire, and worked on a farm in his youth, entering Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1805. In 1809, he entered Yale University and graduated in two years. He began a school in Salem, Massachusetts in March 1812, but gave up on the project by 1815. One of his students had been a young Nathaniel Hawthorne; Worcester tutored Hawthorne privately at the boy's home. During this time, Worcester worked on several works on geography, including A Geographical Dictionary, or Universal Gazetteer, Ancient and Modern, which was published in 1817. In 1823, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences He wrote a much-used textbook, Elements of History, Ancient and Modern, accompanied by an Historical Atlas, published in 1827. Worcester collected philological works and wrote a journal in Europe in 1831. For many years, he co-edited the annual American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge. He earned LL.D. degrees from Brown University (1847) and Dartmouth College (1856).

Worcester's first edited dictionary was an abridgment of Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary, as Improved by Todd, and Abridged by Chalmers; with Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary Combined, published in the United States in 1827, the year before Noah Webster's American Dictionary appeared. Having worked as an assistant on the production of Webster's dictionary, he produced an abridgment of Webster's work in 1829. Worcester believed that Webster's dictionary sacrificed tradition and elegance. Worcester's version added new words, excluded etymology, and focused on pronunciation.

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