Yesterday I explained that the name Webster once was a woman’s professional title if she wove cloth.

I also introduced a guy who’s spent almost 9 years now producing handmade books containing antique dictionary images from Webster’s dictionaries of the 1800s.

He calls his book the Pictorial Webster’s.

Seeing as how there is a major dictionary company named Merriam-Webster you might wonder how he gets away with it.

For instance if I wanted to call my book The Oxford Dictionary of Body Parts I might just hear from an attorney.

I took a look on Amazon and found the Webster’s New World Hacker Dictionary. This is a dictionary of computing words and one Amazon reviewer had concluded his review by saying

“it’s trusted by Webster’s.”

In fact that particular book is published by Wylie.

I suppose it’s perfectly trustworthy but the reason that Wylie and Merriam-Webster and a number of other publishers appear to be sharing the name Webster is that

• on the one hand people put a lot of trust in the name as far as dictionaries go, and
• on the other hand, court battles have been fought over the rights to the name

and…well I’m not sure whether to say everybody lost or everybody won.

Here’s the story.

Shortly after the American Declaration of Independence a guy by the name of Noah Webster came up with a spelling book.

Since all the other spelling books available to American kids were being published by what was at that time thought of as the enemy, England, Webster pretty much had the field to himself and sold a pile of the things.

He got it into his head that he was the arbiter of American English and so within a few decades came out with a dictionary, and then another bigger dictionary.

When he finally died the rights to his dictionaries were bought up by G & C Merriam. They happily went on to produce new editions of the dictionary but there is a long history of the contents of one publisher’s dictionary finding its way into a new and improved dictionary from another publisher.

Since Noah Webster had built up so much brand equity in his name it seemed tempting for other dictionary compilers to slap it on theirs, since Noah’s dictionary had been such an inspiration to them.

The G & C Merriam company didn’t think that was fair and so took another dictionary maker to court. Problem was, according to the court, the original dictionary was out of copyright. So that meant the name was fair game.

Merriam didn’t just lay down and die, but kept paying lawyers for a while all to no avail.

According to the law anyone who wants to call their dictionary Webster’s can. It means just about the same as “dictionary” these days.