Websterisms: In Search of Noah's Headwords (Vocabulary‪)‬

Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) is a browser's paradise, revealing many words whose meaning has changed since Noah's time and others that he idiosyncratically defined. I offer fifty of Webster's definitions below, and challenge the reader to guess the headwords that Webster was trying to define. To make the task more approachable, wordlengths are provided for the to-be-discovered headwords, which are listed in alphabetical order of their appearance in the dictionary. All of these headwords, if not Webster's definitions, should prove to be familiar to readers of Word Ways. 1. A name given in Ceylon to a large snake, a species of Boa, which is said to devour travelers. Its flesh is excellent food. (8)