Websters New International Dictionary and Finnup House

One of the little treasures I came upon while staying in the Finnup House in my recent vision to Garden City, KS was George Finnup's (d. 1937) copy of the 1916 Webster's New International Unabridged Dictionary. Come to think of it, the dictionary wasn't so little. As it says in the introduction, this was the largest one-volume dictionary of the English language to date. Noah Webster had put out his first edition, with aproximately 70,000 words, in 1828; his son-in-law, Chauncey Goodrich, revised it in 1847.*

[*Kind of makes you wonder how Chauncey courted Noah's daughter, doesn't it? I bet when he asked Noah for the hand of his daughter in marriage he said something like this, "Mr. Webster, may I have the pleasure to marry, ME marien, OF marier, fr. L maritare, fr. maritus, become united in wedlock, constitute husband and wife according to law or custom, your daughter?" I bet they had fascinating conversations..]

Well, Webster's was expanded in 1864 to include 114,000 words, becoming for the first time an Unabridged dictionary. By 1890 a new and more "radical" revision was proposed, and it first became "Webster's International Dictionary" because it was now recognized as the authoritative one-volume dictionary in the English-speaking world. Finally, the 1916 edition was called the New International Dictionary, possessing the phenomenal total of 400,000 words. Even today, the most authoritative one-volume dictionary in English is the Websters' Third New International Dictionary (latest revision in 2002). This is the one used in the National Spelling Bee and in most courts of law around the country. Thus, Mr. Finnup's dictionary is the progenitor of the one used in learned culture today.

Opening the Dictionary

I would like to point out two aspects of this dictionary that "date" it nicely for us. First, the 1916 New International contained a feature that was so unattractive that it quickly dropped out of use, but it is interesting to note it use in the history of dictionaries. Each page of the dictionary would really consist of two pages or, to put it differently, the page would be divided in half. The top half would have what we would normally consider to be "regular" words--those that are the most popular ones in use. But then there was the "bottom half" of the page, which listed the most obscure English words, almost all of which were transliterations of Latin words, that appear in almost no other dictionary that I have found. For example, under the "ob's" (I turned there randomly), the dictionary has these words at the bottom of the page: (1) obacerate, interrupt or contradict; (2) ob-and-soller, a subtle disputant; (3) Oberlin theology, founded by Asa Mahan and Charles Finney at that school in the 1840s-1870s; (4) obiit sine prole, he dies without issue; (5) oblimation, a covering with mud or clay, (6) oblocution, evil speech, slander; (7) obloctation; resistance or opposition; (8) obrute, overthrow or overwhelm; (9), obserate, lock up; and (10) obsonation, feasting. I would dare say that well over 99% of English speakers have no idea of what any of those mean. I knew of Oberlin theology because I had studied the history of American higher education, but most of these were new to me, too. We can see immediately why this feature of the 1916 dictionary, added to "pump" the dictionary to 400,000 words, was eliminated in future additions.

But what is interesting from my perspective is that the appearance of these words shows that even in the 20th century we were not quite sure of the extent of the English language. And that is still (maybe even more) the case today. Our debates for additions of words don't relate to which Latinate words we add but rather which foreign foods, items of clothing, fashion, or practices we tend to want to include in English. And, who decides when the chistera, for example (the "basket" in jai-alai), becomes an English word? The problem can be multiplied 1000-fold.

"New" Words in 1916

Another way to get a "snapshot" into the world of a dictionary is to look at the front or addenda pages of the dictionary. These are words that have been approved for inclusion (by someone?) since the previous edition of the dictionary. Thus, they normally represent terms that either have been recently invented or borrowed from other languages. If we look at the 1993 edition of the Webster's Third New International for example (the one I use at home), we have some of the following as "new" words in the early 1990s (or since an earlier revision a few decades earlier). See if you can come up with a reason why these terms would have been new for the 1993 edition.

(1) bichon frise (when did those darling little critters become cool?)
(2) obsess as a verb
(3) nuts and bolts to describe the basic issues or facts
(4) paramedic--when did we start using that word?
(5) oral history--yep, the field exploded in the 1980s.
(6) piagetian--after Jean Piaget, who died in 1980. I wonder if future editions will drop this, if Piaget's star wanes.
(7) primal scream therapy--don't you remember this one?

Well, I could go on and on with respect to the 1993 edition, but you easily see what I am doing. Let me introduce, in closing, about ten terms that were new in the 1916 edition. What conclusions do you draw?

(1) aspirin, defined as a "white crystalline compound with acetyl and salicylic acid used as a drug for the salicylic acid liberated from it in the intestines." What did they do before aspirin?
(2) Bahaism. I could give a long definition, but I won't. The definition gave the estimate of 20,000 Bahais in the US.
(3) Bergsonian. It provides a long definition regarding the process of "creative evolution" developed by this French thinker (b. 1859). The current Unabridged keeps the word but only defines it as "of or relating to Bergson." Ah, the salt has lost its flavor.
(4) aerial sickness. I thought you would like this. "A sickness felt by aeronauts due to high speed of flights and rapidity in change of altitudes." Planes were new. Pilots were called "aeronauts."
(5) catharsis. It was defined as a "psychological process of releasing an abnormal excitement by reestablishing hte association of the emotion with the memory or idea of the event that first caused it..." Yes, psychology, under the influence of Freud, had just made a big "splash."
(6) Boy Scout. They just came in about 1908 or so.
(7) cafeteria. Yep, this was new in 1916. Don't need a definition, do we?
(8) bird woman, "an aviatress." I don't think we use this anymore..
(9) moron, a "person whose intellectual development process stops at about the eighth year." Good that we now have that word, don't you think?
(10) Ido. This is "an artificial international language selected by the Delegates for the Adoption of an Auxiliary International Langauge in 1907" as a new international language. Ido, however, has just about gone the root of the dodo, as the Wikipedia article on it estimates that there are only about 2,000-5,000 speakers of it worldwide. Ah, a good idea, but no cigar.

Well, that introduces you to one of the fascinating books of the Finnup House. I think I could read this dictionary for hours, though I am sure you wouldn't tolerate many more essays on it!

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