It’s the birthday of Noah Webster (1758-1843), author of the first significant dictionary of American English and also a sort of honorary Founding Father who hung out with the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and once, as an arrogant 26 year old, criticized George Washington at a dinner party hosted by same for considering hiring a Scottish tutor instead of an American.

Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, into a simple farm family that nonetheless had an impeccable American pedigree: his father was descended from John Webster, a governor of Connecticut, and his mother from William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony. (My husband is also a descendent of Governor Bradford, which makes Webster practically my first cousin. Basking in the glow here.) Webster’s father mortgaged the farm to send him to Yale but then said “good luck to you” and stopped all financial support, so Webster—too poor for law school at first—became a teacher.

Although the American Revolution was now over, many school books still came from England and pledged allegiance to King George. Webster’s response was to write an American textbook called A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which included The American Spelling Book (1783) as well as a grammar (1784) and a reader (1785). The Spelling Book became known as the Blue-Backed Speller and was the bestselling book of the 19th century, second only to the Bible. It has sold a total of 100 million copies and never been out of print, and Webster is largely responsible for the differences between American and British spelling (for example, “color” instead of “colour”).

In the meantime, Webster, always arrogant, condescending, and frankly unlikeable, was ditched by two women before marrying a third, Rebecca Greenleaf, with whom he had eight children, in 1789. They lived in New Haven, Connecticut, then Amherst, Massachusetts—where Webster helped found Amherst College—then later New Haven again.

In 1801, Webster got down to the business of writing his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), a precursor to his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), which took 22 years to finish, required Webster to learn 26 languages for research purposes, and included about 70,000 definitions, about half of which had never appeared in a dictionary before. This dictionary “was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson’s 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well,” and that’s straight from the Merriam-Webster website, so that can’t possibly be biased, right? (The Merriam brothers acquired the rights to Webster’s dictionary upon his death and have been cranking out fantastic dictionaries ever since. All hail Merriam-Webster.)

Fun fact: Webster was a house counter. He literally counted all the houses in every town he went to and then talked about it with other house counters, so yes, evidently that was a thing. And yes, Webster probably had obsessive compulsive disorder. (Read more fun facts about Webster here.)

Have a fantastic Wednesday in spite of extremely gloomy skies and stay scrupulously honest to the data.