The Infamous W3

Reference Book of the Day:
Webster's Third New International

Gove, Philip Babock Gove, gen. ed. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1961.

The “Webster’s” brand is the most distinguished in American lexicography, and it stretches all the way back to Noah Webster himself. Webster compiled several reference books, the most important of which was An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828.

Now these are the generations of Webster: Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) begat a Second Edition (1840); the Second Edition begat a New Revised edition (1847); the New Revised edition begat a Royal Quarto Edition (1864); the Royal Quarto Edition begat Webster’s International Dictionary (1890); Webster’s International Dictionary begat Webster’s New International Dictionary (1909); Webster’s New International Dictionary begat a Second Edition (1934); that second edition begat Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), popularly known as Webster’s Third or just W3.

And then civilization as we know it came to an end. Bands of marauders roamed a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and the living envied the dead.

That, at least, is the impression you’d get from the press at the time of its release. WEBSTER’S LAYS AN EGG, declared Richmond’s News Leader. The Chicago Sun-Times declared ANARCHY IN LANGUAGE. The Washington Post looked back to W2 in 1934, advising, KEEP YOUR OLD WEBSTER’S. Science betrayed anxiety: SAY IT “AIN’T” SO. The New Republic tried the same ploy: IT AIN’T RIGHT. The Atlantic was the bluntest: SABOTAGE IN SPRINGFIELD.

Springfield, Mass., was the home of G. & C. Merriam Co, which was where Philip Babcock Gove had worked for decades on the dictionary that attracted so much contempt.

And boy was there a lot of contempt. “Small wonder,” the Washington Sunday Star editorialized, “that our English-speaking world, when it thus tolerates the debasement of its language, is having trouble with creatures like beatniks — not to mention Nikita Krushchev and his kind — who are developing a style of writing that may best be described as literary anarchy, to use a polite word.”

The Sunday Star wasn’t the only paper to invoke the Red Menace: many reviewers looked at the title, Webster’s Third New International, and punned on the Third International of the Bolsheviks in 1919. In the Detroit News, for instance, the Rt. Rev. Richard S. Emrich saw in Webster’s Third the breakdown in values that led to the social unrest of the early sixties: “The bolshevik spirit,” he wrote, “is to be found everywhere, not just in Russia.” His rhetoric rises to the level of an Evangelical sermon:

Wherever our standards are discarded in family life, the care of the soul, art, literature, or education, there is the bolshevik spirit. Wherever men believe that what is, is right; wherever the discard discipline for an easy short-cut, there is bolshevism. It is a spirit that corrupts everything it touches.

As a result of this corrupting spirit, “the greatest of all American dictionaries has been corrupted at center.”

What did Gove do to warrant such responses? Did he deliver the nuclear launch codes to the Russians? Was he using the dictionary business as a front for a kiddie-porn ring? Did he shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Gove’s great crime was this statement:

The function of grammars and dictionaries is to tell the truth about language. Not what somebody thinks ought to be the truth, nor what somebody wants to ram down somebody else’s throat, nor what somebody wants to sell somebody else as being the “best” language, but what people actually do when they talk and write. Anything else is not the truth, but an untruth.

The fight was over the proper role of a dictionary. Gove believed — as just about all serious linguists believed, and as many lexicographers believed even then — that the lexicographer’s job was to describe the language as it was. His rivals believed that the lexicographer's job was to prescribe the language as it should be.

That tension has been working behind the lexicographical scenes since at least the eighteenth century — it’s the dilemma in the title of my book — but it boiled over as never before in 1961. It's a subject to which I'll return often in this blog.

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Webster's Third is one of the few reference books I’ll talk about here that’s still easily available in bookshops, though it’s big and not cheap. Most of the copies available now are reprints, lightly updated from the original edition of 1961, but substantially the same book. You can also use the more recent abridged versions derived from W3, the Collegiates, available in print and in a very handy online version.

The most extensive study of the dictionary is Herbert C. Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), which is part biography of Gove and part chronicle of his life’s work. You can also read a lot of the early reviews in Dictionaries and That Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1962).

And there’s a whole chapter on W3 in my own Lexicographer’s Dilemma, which you should run out and buy immediately. (Already have one? Buy two; they make great gifts.)