1. DRIVE – The Drive of Noah Webster
Noah turned his second-floor study into his dictionary room. The main feature of his workspace was a circular table on which he neatly arranged grammars and dictionaries of all available lan- guages. He worked standing up from the first light of morning until the daylight grew dim. For each word, he started at the same place at the table with the same dictionaries and began making notes. He would next make his way through every grammar and diction- ary, book by book, around the table, carefully studying the word’s various definitions in each text, adding more notes every step of the way.
He familiarized himself with over twenty languages, including Latin and Arabic, to figure out the etymology of words — their origin, and historical development. He collected dozens of for- eign language dictionaries and arranged them side by side. For each word chosen, he would find it in the first text and trace it back through time, book by book, to its earliest source. He would then summarize his findings into a written record from its first use forward. To Noah, word origins were much more than simple histories. They were “the history of the progress of ideas and the human intellect,” he wrote.
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