According to Webster's

In the year that Jonathan Edwards died, 1758, there was born a man in West Hartford, Conn., 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.

Noah Webster was born in 1758. He came of age during the American Revolution, and he was American to the very core. As he looked across the land at his fellow Americans, he saw that they spoke British English. Webster wanted Americans to have their own form of the English language—American English. So, in 1806, he published 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 thirty-seven thousand entries.

In 1828, he expanded his compendious dictionary to include seventy thousand entries; he titled it An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster gave us many of the spellings that differentiate American English from British English. For instance, we don't spell center with an -re ending. Webster thought center was more accurate to how the word sounded. He had some other innovations that did not take. Instead of women, he wanted it to be spelled wimmen.

In 1831, the Merriam brothers, who were printers in Springfield, Mass., bought the rights to his dictionary and the publishing rights. And so, it became Merriam-Webster's Dictionary.

Noah Webster also published an edition of the Bible. He thought there were many words in the King James Version that had changed their meaning over the centuries and no longer made sense. One such word is staffs. In the King James Version, the word used for the plural of staff was staves. And as Webster pointed out, stave in American English simply means a piece of timber used in making casks. It doesn't mean staffs. So, Webster changed it. Another word is conversation. While Webster acknowledged what this word meant, he said its usage had changed, so he used the expression manner of life instead. Another word that Webster thought had moved on in its meaning is quicken. That word for us just means "accelerate." It doesn't mean to make alive. Webster used revive or vivify instead of quicken. So, many of the words that we assume are in the King James actually come to us through later revisions thanks to Noah Webster and his Bible.

In the front of his Bible, Webster included a preface. The last paragraph says this: "The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society, the best book for regulating temporal concerns of men and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity." And what does felicity mean? Look it up.