Noah Webster Publishes "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language", His First Dictionary

Noah Webster, the author of popular readers and spelling books for schools, published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806.

In it, he introduced features that would be a hallmark of future editions such as American spellings (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.) and including technical terms from the arts and sciences rather than confining his dictionary to literary words. He spent the next two decades working to expand his dictionary.