Interesting facts about the life and work of the American lexicographer, Noah Webster
1. He was great-uncle to a very famous poet. Noah Webster was the great-uncle of none other than the poet T. S. Eliot. It may not be stretching things too much, in fact, to say that Eliot shared his great-uncle’s fondness for precision, especially when it came to defining words, and even more especially when it came to defining the names we give to important concepts. ‘Can “Education” Be Defined?’ was the title of one of Eliot’s lectures, in 1950. Fittingly, in the same lecture Eliot remarked, ‘people have been very far from agreeing upon a definition of the word “definition”.’ His great-uncle had made definitions his bread-and-butter.