When Noah Webster was young, he was a teacher. He disliked American elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages (crowd) into one-room schoolhouses. And he quickly became tired the books he used in class. They were all about the English people and places. he wanted books that would be interesting to the American children, he wrote three books with many American examples. By 1785, he had written his speller, a grammar book and a reader for elementary schools.
Webster worked hard to change the spellings of American English. He suggested words (spell) in the same way they were pronounced. He tried many ways to ask people to help him to do this. For example, one day he asked a boy in a printed shop to print words theatre, centre, colour, and labour as theater, center, color, and labor.
With the money he made from his books, particularly his speller, Webster could start his great work on his famous dictionary, took him more than twenty years to finish. It also helped create the popular contests (know) as "spelling bees". And today, Webster's dictionary is thought (be) the most important American English dictionary in the whole world. In a way, Webster dedicated his Speller and Dictionary to (provide) an intellectual foundation for American nationalism.
