Gift of knowledge

Courtesy photo/Kearns-Saint Ann School

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Rotary Club members pose with some Kearns-Saint Ann School students and the dictionaries they gave them.

Members of the South Salt Lake City Rotary Club recently presented Kearns-Saint Ann School third-graders with new dictionaries. Before handing out the books to students, Sue Hall told the students many interesting facts about the history of the dictionary. Americans put the British to shame when Noah Webster compiled his dictionary of the English language. It took 27 years to write and had 70,000 words. The longest word included had 1,109 letters. Webster’s dictionary became a best seller and drove the British Philological Society to begin compiling a comprehensive dictionary, which would later become the Oxford English Dictionary. The students were very excited to receive their very own copies and were anxious to begin using them.