Today marks the 256th birthday of Noah Webster, who was born on Oct. 16, 1758. This is a man who really needs no introduction, but if I must explain, he published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806, which was the first American dictionary.
Webster would go on to publish An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, which included an impressive 70,000 entries. Brothers George and Charles Merriam purchased the rights to create revised editions of the dictionary from Webster's heirs in 1843, which would come to be known as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. You may have heard of it.
Obviously, America has changed a lot in two centuries, and our language has evolved along with that. With each new edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary that gets released about every 10 years, we often hear about the words added, but what about those poor words that become obsolete and are eventually removed from the dictionary?
This happens when what the word refers to is no longer used or the word is simply obsolete. Editors scour multiple sources, such as the Internet, LexisNexis and other dictionaries, to see if a word is still relevant today. Just because some words can no longer be found in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary doesn't mean they are gone forever. You can still find all of the words in the unabridged version of the dictionary online.
In honor of Webster's birthday today, let's pay tribute to those fallen words that can no longer be found in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
1. frutescent (adj.): "having or approaching the appearance or habit of a shrub; shrubby"
2. hodad (n.): a word from The Beach Boys era meaning "a nonsurfer who frequents surfing beaches and pretends to be a surfer"
3. nephoscope (n.): "an instrument for observing the direction of motion and velocity of clouds"
4. Ostmark (n.): unit of currency in the former East Germany
5. snollygoster (n.): a shrewd, unprincipled person. President Harry S. Truman loved this word, and he sometimes used it to refer to members of the Republican Party.
6. sternforemost (adv.): "with the stern in advance: backward; old nautical term"
7. stylopodium (n.): "a disk-shaped or conical swelling or expansion at the base of the style in plants of the family Umbelliferae"
8. tattletale gray (n): "a grayish white: off-white." The term was popularized by an old ad campaign for the laundry detergent Fels-Naptha in the 1930s.
9. Vitamin G (n.): an outdated term for what is now known as riboflavin, which is a type of B vitamin that helps the body grow, produce red blood cells and release energy from carbohydrates
[H/T: Merriam-Webster Online]
