he same word.
But, to establish the principle above named, which appears to me the only
one on which any such question can be resolved, or the identity of words be
fixed at all, we must assume that every word has one right pronunciation,
and only one; one just orthography, and only one; and some proper
signification, which, though perhaps not always the same, is always a part
of its essence. For when two words of different meaning are spelled or
pronounced alike, not to maintain the second point of difference, against
the double orthography or the double pronunciation of either, is to
confound their identity at once, and to prove by the rule that two
different words are one and the same, by first absurdly making them so.

OBS. 7.--In no part of grammar is usage more unsettled and variable than in
that which relates to the _figure of words_. It is a point of which modern
writers have taken but very little notice. Lily, and other ancient Latin
grammarians, reckoned both species and figure among the grammatical
accidents of nearly all the different parts of speech; and accordingly
noticed them, in their Etymology, as things worthy to be thus made distinct
topics, like numbers, genders, cases, moods, tenses, &c. But the manner of
compounding words in Latin, and also in Greek, is always by consolidation.
No use appears to have been made of the _hyphen_, in joining the words of
those languages, though the name of the mark is a Greek compound, meaning
"_under one_." The compounding of words is one principal means of
increasing their number; and the arbitrariness with which that is done or
neglected in English, is sufficient of itself to make the number of our
words a matter of great uncertainty. Such terms, however, having the
advantage of explaining themselves in a much greater degree than others,
have little need of definition; and when new things are formed, it is very
natural and proper to give them new names of this sort: as, _steamboat,
railroad_. The propriety or impropriety of these additions to the language,
is not to be determined by dictionaries; for that must be settled by usage
before any lexicographer will insert them. And so numerous, after all, are
the discrepancies found in our best dictionaries, that many a word may have
its day and grow obsolete, before a nation can learn from them the right
way of spelling it; and many a fashionable thing may go entirely out of
use, before a man can thus determine how to name