The etymology of the language, was a subject to which he devoted much attention, and in which he made great advances. To qualify himself for tracing the derivations of English words, he studied some twenty languages, and wrote out a synopsis of the leading words of each, and incorporated the chief results of this extraordinary investigation in the very full and instructive statement of words of similar imports, which in the larger Dictionary is prefixed to English words, and which he prepared for the press also, as a separate work, of about half the size of the _American Dictionary_, entitled "_A Synopsis of Words in Twenty Languages_," which is still unpublished.
In 1812, he removed to Amherst, in Massachusetts, where he devoted ten years entirely to these labors. He returned to New Haven in 1822; in the following year he received from Yale College the degree of LL. D., and in the spring of 1824 he proceeded to Paris to consult in the _Bibliothèque du Roi_ some works not accessible in this country, and then went to England and passed eight months in the libraries of the University of Cambridge.
Returning to America, he made arrangements for the publication of his great work, and it finally appeared, near the end of 1826, in an edition of twenty-five hundred copies, in two quarto volumes, which were sold at twenty dollars per copy. An edition of three thousand copies was soon after printed in England.
Dr. Webster was now seventy years of age, and he considered his life-task accomplished; but habits of literary occupation had become fixed and necessary, and after a few months he began to rewrite his _History of the United States for Schools_. In 1840 he published a second edition of the _Dictionary_, in two octavo volumes; in 1843, _A Collection of Papers, on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects_, selected from his various writings in early life; and in 1847 another edition of the _American Dictionary_ appeared, after a thorough revision of it by Professor Goodrich, of Yale College. In this edition very large additions were made, amounting to a fifth of the whole work. There were new words, and new definitions, when needed; careful attention was bestowed on technical terms of science and art; and it was made a general cyclopædia of knowledge. Yet by employing a finer type, and adopting a close yet clear style of printing, the original work, with all these copious additions, was brought within the compass of a single quarto, which has been styled the finest specimen of book-manufacture ever produced in America. A revised edition of the abridgement was issued at the same time, and both volumes have had a circulation which evinces the general appreciation of their value. Several of the New England states, we believe, have furnished a copy of the quarto Dictionary to every school district within their limits, and the legislature of New-York, during its recent session, passed a law for the distribution of some thousands of copies in the school districts of this state also. Whatever may be said of the Dictionary by Dr. WEBSTER, it will not be questioned by the disinterested scholar that it is one of the most extraordinary and honorable monuments of well-directed intellectual labor of which we have any account in the histories of literature or learning. It is as great an advance from the work of Dr. Johnson, as that was from the wretched vocabularies of the English language which existed before his time; and so accurate and exhausting has been the investigation which it displays that no rival work is likely to take its place until sufficient time has elapsed for the language itself to pass into a new condition.