List of Famous Lexicographers

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [OS 7 September] – 13 December 1784) was an English writer. He is often called Dr. Johnson. Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. He was a devout Anglican. Politically, he was a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that Johnson is "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history." James Boswell wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson about him. Walter Jackson Bate described this work as "the most famous sing".

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He wrote the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien served as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945. He was also Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis; they both belonged to the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings.

Sir William Alexander Craigie (13 August 1867 – 2 September 1957) was a philologist and lexicographer. He graduated from the University of St Andrews. Craigie was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-edited the 1933 supplement with C. T. Onions. From 1916 to 1925, he served as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He tutored JRR Tolkien for the Anglo-Saxon chair position. Craigie married Jessie Kinmond Hutchen of Dundee (born 1864 or 65; died 1947).

Eric Honeywood Partridge was a New Zealand–British lexicographer who specialized in English slang. His writing career paused only because he served the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II.

Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, FBA (7 February 1837 – 26 July 1915), was a Scottish lexicographer and philologist. Murray edited the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.

Philip Babcock Gove (1902–1972) was an American lexicographer. In 1961, he was editor-in-chief of Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Gove earned his A.B. from Dartmouth College, his A.M. from Harvard University, his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his D.Litt. from Dartmouth. He began working for the G. and C. Merriam Company in 1946. Gove managed Webster's Third from 1950 to 1952, served as general editor from 1952 to 1960, and remained editor-in-chief until his retirement.

Reverend Thomas Dyche was an English schoolmaster and lexicographer from Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He published several books on the English language, including one considered the first English book published in Asia. Dyche is remembered for his reference books and his work on pronunciation. Dyche's New General English Dictionary was printed from 1735 to 1798 and included eighteen editions.

Noah Webster Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author. He is called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education." His "Blue-backed Speller" books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read. Webster's name became synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States. This includes the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary, first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language. He was born in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27 [O.S. April 15] 1894 – December 25, 1995), born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy (Russian: Никола́й Леони́дович Сло́нимский), was a Russian-born American conductor, author, pianist, composer, and lexicographer. He wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective. He also edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

Henry Bradley was a British philologist and lexicographer. He succeeded James Murray as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Patrick Hanks is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He edited dictionaries covering general language and personal names. Hanks studied at Ardingly College, University College, Oxford, and Masaryk University. After graduating from Oxford, he began his career as editor of the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary. In 1970, he became editor of the Collins English Dictionary. From 1980 to 1983, he directed the Names Research Unit at the University of Essex, England, where he pursued a PhD under Yorick Wilks.

Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda (Hebrew: אֱלִיעֶזֶר בֵּן־יְהוּדָה‬; pronounced [eli'ʕezeɾ ben jehu'da]; born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman; 7 January 1858 – 16 December 1922) was a Hebrew lexicographer and newspaper editor. He drove the revival of the Hebrew language in the modern era.

Jeff Prucher is an author.

Henry Watson Fowler (March 10, 1858 – December 26, 1933) was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer, and commentator on English usage. He wrote A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and worked on the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The Times called him "a lexicographical genius." After his Oxford education, Fowler taught as a schoolmaster until middle age. He then worked in London as a freelance writer and journalist but achieved little success. Beginning in 1906, he published seminal grammar, style, and linguistic works with his brother Francis.

Anton Pann was an Ottoman-born Wallachian composer, musicologist, and Romanian-language poet. He also worked as a printer, translator, and schoolteacher. Pann was noted for his activities as a folklorist, collector of proverbs, lexicographer, and textbook author. Anton Pann was born Antonie Pantoleon-Petroveanu in the 1790s and died on 2 November 1854.

Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490 – March 26, 1546) was an English diplomat and scholar.

Ivar Andreas Aasen (August 5, 1813 – September 23, 1896) was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright, and poet. He assembled dialects to create Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language.

Allameh Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (1879–March 9, 1956) was a prominent Iranian linguist. He wrote the Dehkhoda dictionary, which is the most extensive dictionary of the Persian language published to date.

Katherine Patricia Mary Barber was born in 1959. She is a Canadian lexicographer and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Winnipeg in 1980. She received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Ottawa in 1990. From 1984 to 1991, Barber lectured at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research associate for the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary project at the University of Ottawa. She was also Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Dictio

Avraham Even-Shoshan (1906–1984) was a Russian-born Hebrew linguist and lexicographer. He compiled the Even-Shoshan dictionary, one of the foremost dictionaries of the Hebrew language.

Émile Maximilien Paul Littré (February 1, 1801 – June 2, 1881) was a French lexicographer, freemason, and philosopher. He is best known for his Dictionnaire de la langue française, commonly called "The Littré".

Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Robert William Burchfield CNZM, CBE (January 27, 1923 – July 5, 2004) was a lexicographer and scholar. He edited the Oxford English Dictionary for thirty years, up to 1986, and served as chief editor starting in 1971.

Susie Dent (born 1964/1965) is an English lexicographer and etymologist. She appeared in "Dictionary Corner" on the Channel 4 game show Countdown every year since 1992. She also appears on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, a post-watershed comedy version presented by Jimmy Carr. Since 2016, she has been Honorary Vice-President of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP).

Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910) was an English philologist and one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary. He founded learned societies on early English literature and made major editorial contributions. His most notable work was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales. He also taught at the London Working Men's College and campaigned against injustice.

Ladislav Zgusta (20 March 1924 – 27 April 2007) was a Czech–American historical linguist and lexicographer. He wrote one of the first textbooks on lexicography. Zgusta taught linguistics and classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dutch lexicographer Piet van Sterkenburg called Zgusta "the twentieth-century godfather of lexicography." In 1992, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Gold Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences for his work in Humanities.

Jesse Sheidlower (born August 5, 1968) is an author and editor specializing in English and lexicography. From 1999 to 2005, he served as Principal North American Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. He then became editor-at-large focusing on North American usage. Sheidlower left the OED in 2013.

Adrian Room was a Toponymist, Onomastician, and Lexicographer. He began researching name origins in 1974 and published over 50 reference books.

John Simpson (born 13 October 1953) is an English lexicographer. He served as Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1993 to 2013.

Thomas Cooper (or Couper; c. 1517 – 29 April 1594) was an English bishop, lexicographer, theologian, and writer.

Peter Mark Roget (UK: US: ; 18 January 1779 – 12 September 1869) was a British physician, natural theologian, and lexicographer. In 1852, he published the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words.

Barbara Ann Kipfer (born 1954) is a lexicographer, linguist, ontologist, and part-time archaeologist. She wrote more than 75 books and calendars. One book was 14,000 Things to be Happy About (Workman), which has over 1.25 million copies in print. The 25th anniversary edition of that book was published in 2014. Kipfer edited the 5th through 8th editions of Roget's International Thesaurus. She holds multiple advanced degrees, including an MPhil and PhD in Linguistics (University of Exeter), a PhD in Archaeology (Greenwich University), an MA and PhD in Buddhist Studies (Akamai University), and a BS in Physical Education (Valpa).

Paul Charles Jules Robert (born 19 October 1910 in Orléansville, French Algeria; died 11 August 1980 in Mougins, Alpes-Maritimes, France) was a French lexicographer and publisher. He is best known for his Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (1953), often called the Robert, and its abridgement, the Petit Robert (1967).

Sir William Smith was an English lexicographer.

Joseph Emerson Worcester (August 24, 1784 – October 27, 1865) was an American lexicographer. He competed with Noah Webster for the title of Webster's Dictionary during the mid-nineteenth century, a rivalry known as the "dictionary wars". Worcester focused his dictionaries on traditional pronunciation and spelling, unlike Noah Webster, who attempted to Americanize words. American writers respected Worcester, and his dictionary held strong influence over the American marketplace until a later version of Webster's book appeared in 1864.

Grant Barrett (born 1970) is an American lexicographer specializing in slang, jargon, and new usage. He co-hosted and co-produced the nationwide radio show A Way With Words. Barrett authored Perfect English Grammar (Zephyros Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1623157142). He also edited several dictionaries, including the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (McGraw-Hill, 2006, ISBN 0-07-145804-2), the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-517685-5), and the Double-Tongued Dictionary. He serves as the vice president of communications and technology.

Abu ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad ibn ‘Amr ibn Tammām al-Farāhīdī al-Azdī al-Yaḥmadī (Arabic: أبو عبدالرحمن الخليل بن أحمد الفراهيدي; 718 – 786 CE), known as Al-Farahidi or Al-Khalīl, was a philologist and leading grammarian of Basra, Iraq. He produced the oldest extant dictionary of the Arabic language, Kitab al-'Ayn (Arabic: كتاب العين), which is called "The Source". He introduced the standard harakat system (vowel marks in Arabic script) and helped develop ʿArūḍ, the study of prosody, musicology, and poetic metre.

Antonio de Nebrija (1444 – 5 July 1522) was the most influential Spanish humanist of his time. Though he wrote poetry and commented on literature, his main contributions were in grammar and lexicography. Nebrija authored the first Spanish grammar in 1492 and the first dictionary of the Spanish language in 1495. His grammar is considered the first published grammar of any Romance language.

Thomas Blount, who lived from 1618 to 1679, was an English antiquarian and lexicographer.

Antoine Furetière (28 December 1619 – 14 May 1688) was a French scholar, writer, and lexicographer.

Isaac Kaufmann Funk (September 10, 1839 – April 4, 1912) was an American Lutheran minister, editor, lexicographer, publisher, and spelling reformer. He co-founded the Funk & Wagnalls Company. Funk fathered author Wilfred J. Funk, who started his own publishing company, "Wilfred Funk, Inc.", and wrote the "Word Power" feature in Reader's Digest from 1945 to 1962. Funk was also the grandfather of author Peter Funk, who continued his father's authorship of "Word Power" until 2003. The Funk & Wagnalls Company published The Literary Digest, The Standard Dictionary of the English Language, and Funk & Wagna.

Judah Achilles Joffe was a Yiddish philologist. He published his 1949 critical edition of the Bovo-Bukh, the most popular chivalric romance in the Yiddish language. Joffe co-edited the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with Yudel Mark. He researched the Slavic component in Yiddish, translated Yiddish, English, and French, and proposed regularized spelling for Yiddish. Joffe co-founded the American branch of YIVO and worked in its linguistics section with other scholars.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (Russian: Влади́мир Ива́нович Даль, IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ ˈdalʲ]; November 10, 1801 – September 22, 1872) was a leading Russian-language lexicographer and a founding member of the Russian Geographical Society. Dal knew at least six languages, including Turkic, and is considered an early Turkologist. During his life, he compiled and documented the region's oral history, which later appeared in Russian and became part of modern folklore.

Willard Richardson Espy (December 11, 1910 – February 20, 1999) was an American editor, philologist, writer, poet, and local historian. Raised in Oysterville, Washington, Espy studied at the University of Redlands in California. He later edited in New York City and contributed to publications like Reader's Digest, The New Yorker, and Punch. In the 1960s, he published books on philology and poetry collections. Espy became the best-known collector and commentator on word play of his time. He published the nati in 1977.

Pierre Athanase Larousse (October 23, 1817 – January 3, 1875) was a French grammarian, lexicographer, and encyclopaedist. He published many key educational and reference works from 19th-century France. This includes the 15 volume Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.

Samuel Pegge the younger (1733 – 22 May 1800) was an antiquary, poet, musical composer, and lexicographer. His work frequently overlapped with that of Samuel Pegge and his wife Anne. He was the only son surviving from Samuel and Anne, daughter of Benjamin Clarke, esq., of Stanley, near Wakefield, Yorkshire. After receiving a classical education at St. John's College, Cambridge, he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. The Duke of Devonshire appointed him one of the Grooms of the Privy Chamber and an Esquire of the king's household. This happened on 2 June.

Charles Talbut Onions (C. T. Onions) (10 September 1873 – 8 January 1965) was an English grammarian and lexicographer. He edited the Oxford English Dictionary four times.

Adam Willis Wagnalls (September 24, 1843 – September 3, 1924) was an American publisher. He co-founded the Funk & Wagnalls Company in 1877. Wagnalls was born in Lithopolis, Ohio, but he moved away at age five. He attended Wittenberg College (now Wittenberg University) in Springfield, Ohio. There, he studied with Isaac Kaufmann Funk and became a lutheran minister. He married Hester Anna Willis, who also came from Lithopolis. They had one child, Mabel Wagnalls Jones. Isaac Kaufmann Funk founded the business of I. K. Funk & Company in 1876. Adam Wagnalls joined the firm as a partner in 1877.

John Walker (18 March 1732 in Colney Hatch, Middlesex – 1 August 1807 in London) was an English stage actor, philologist, and lexicographer.