Robert Burchfield

Robert William Burchfield CNZM CBE (27 January 1923 – 5 July 2004) was a scholar, writer, and lexicographer.

Born in Wanganui, New Zealand, he studied at Wanganui Technical College and Victoria University in Wellington. After war service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, he graduated MA from Wellington in 1948 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford University in England, where his preparation of an edition of the Ormulum was supervised by J.R.R. Tolkien. C. T. Onions, then Magdalen librarian, recommended him to Dan Davin as editor of the second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: Burchfield worked on the Supplement from 1957 to 1986. Subsequently he produced a controversial, substantially rewritten and less prescriptivist, edition of Modern English Usage, the famous style guide.

He died at the age of 81.

Works

• Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, 4 vols, 1972–1986
• The Spoken Word, 1981
• The English Language, 1985
• Studies in Lexicography, 1987
• Unlocking the English Language, 1991
• Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5: English in Britain and Overseas, 1994
• (ed.) Fowler's Modern English Usage, 1998

External links

• Obituary of Robert Burchfield (Daily Telegraph)
• Oxford English Dictionary website entry for Robert Burchfield