Author: Peter Martin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0691210179

Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.