Welcome to five minutes in church history hosted by Dr Stephen Nichols, where we take a little

break from the present to go exploring the past. Travel back in time as we look at the people,

events, and even the places that have shaped the story of Christianity.

This is our story, our family history.

Let's get started.

In the year that Jonathan Edwards died, 1758, there was born a man in West Hartford, Connecticut by the name of Noah Webster.

Now, if you were to look up Webster in Webster's Dictionary,

what would you find?

You wouldn't find anything, but what you should find is the man who gave us the American dictionary.

No Webster, as I said, was born in 1758. He came of age right during the American Revolution. said was American

American to the American Revolution and Noah Webster was American to the very core.

And as he looked across the land at his fellow Americans, he saw that their English was British English,

and Noah Webster wanted Americans to have American English.

So in 1806, he published what was titled a

compendious dictionary of the English language.

Now if you look up the word

compendious you will find that it means big and this was a big dictionary it had

37,000 entries. It had the word suckatash in it. It also had the word

Skittles. Now we hear the word Skittles today and we think of the candy.

But that's not what Skittles meant in 1806. If you would like to find

out what that meant, well, look it up. In 1828, he expanded his compendious dictionary and now it had 70,000 entries and he entitled this an American

dictionary of the English language.

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