Open Codex Code & Culture

Self in Webster’s dictionary and self-help

In a 99% Invisible episode, Avery Trufelman stated that America’s 19th-century preoccupation with the self and self-help was reflected in the fact that Webster’s 1841 edition of his dictionary had 67 additional words prefixed with “self-”. I’ve yet to find this factoid repeated, to say nothing of finding evidence for the claim.

I count 116 “self-” entries in the 1828 version. In the 1841 version I count 179. That’s 63 additions. (This unfortunately required me to manually count entries as I could not find nicely formatted versions.) Back then, though, Johnson was not consistent with how he dealt with parts of speech and related words. For example, the 1828 version has “self-abusing” and “self-abuse”; the 1841 version only has the former. Similarly, the 1841 addition added “self-abasing” to 1821’s “self-abasement” and “self-abased.”

Trimming the additions down to what I thought were meaningful differences – i.e., not simple grammatical variations – I count 44 additions between the 1828 and 1841 editions.

Given that the 1828 version is reported to have 70,000 words – I did not count myself – and advertisements for the 1841 claimed “many thousand more words than that or any other English dictionary hitherto published” it probably is fair to conclude the 38% increase in “self-” words was significant.

Meaningful “self-” additions

self-adjusting self-aggrandizement self-annihilation self-applying self-assured self-attractive self-beguiled self-condemnation self-dereliction self-destroying self-devised self-doomed self-dubbed self-educated self-elected self-elective self-governed self-gratulation self-ignorant self-immolating self-inflicted self-insufficiency self-invited self-judging self-made self-propagating self-regulated self-reliance self-reproachingly self-repulsive self-ruined self-sacrificing self-satisfied self-sounding self-spurring self-suspended self-suspicious self-sustained self-taught self-torturing self-troubling self-upbraiding self-violence self-worship

Update 2022-07-26: Avery Trufelman referred to Cheng, who cites Zakim (2006):

… in the early 1840s. Driven by the same concerns, American physicians had a few years earlier identified a new medical condition they diagnosed as “moral insanity,” a term used of persons who failed to restrain their passions. It was a distinctly post-patriarchal disorder, born of an age “of the first person singular,” as Emerson described it. Noah Webster accordingly added sixty-seven new words to the second edition of his American Dictionary in 1841 that all began with the prefix “self.” This was convincing, if circumstantial, evidence of the transformation of Americans’ personal sovereignty… [note 50: Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language Containing the Whole Vocabulary of the First Edition … the Entire Correction and Improvements of the Second Edition … to Which Is Prefixed an Introductory Dissertation (Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam, 1849). (Zakim 2006, pp. 122-123)].

Also, see this thread on r/dictionary.

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