William Burley Lockwood

The cover of Indo-European Philology Historical and Comparative, 1969.

William Burley Lockwood (13 April 1917 - 30 April 2012) was a Professor of Germanic and Indo-European Philology at the University of Reading from 1968 until his retirement in 1982.

After leaving school, he went to Manchester University and obtained First Class Honours in German in 1942, followed by a DipEd at Bristol.

After working briefly in the German Department at Durham University in 1945 Bill Lockwood taught at the University of Birmingham, until in 1961 he received an invitation to the Chair of Comparative Philology at the Humboldt-Universität in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic.

As he left Birmingham, the University awarded him a D.Litt. on the basis of his many publications. 1961 was however the year in which the Communist regime erected its infamous wall, and after four years of increasing disillusionment with the political climate he returned to the West.

A year later he was invited to take up a specially established readership at Reading, which was converted into a chair in 1968, and he remained at Reading until his retirement.

Selected publications

• The Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names (1984, 2nd edn. 1993).
• An Informal History of the German Language (1965, 2nd edn. 1976).
• Historical German Syntax (1968).
• A Panorama of Indo-European Languages (1972).
• Languages of the British Isles Past and Present (1975).
• German Today: The Advanced Learner's Guide (1987).
• Lehrbuch der modernen jiddischen Sprache (1995).
• An Informal Introduction to English Etymology (1995).