author
Ernest Weekley
1865–1954
A lively scholar of word origins, he helped make etymology readable and enjoyable for a wide audience. Best known for An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, he also spent decades teaching modern languages at Nottingham.
2 Audiobooks
The Romance of Names
by Ernest Weekley
The Romance of Words (4th ed.)
by Ernest Weekley
About the author
Born on April 27, 1865, Ernest Weekley was a British philologist and lexicographer whose work centered on the history of words. He is best remembered for his books on etymology, especially An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921), a reference work that remained influential long after it appeared.
Weekley taught at the University of Nottingham, where he served as Professor of Modern Languages from 1898 to 1938. Alongside his scholarly work, he wrote in a clear, engaging way that opened up subjects like surnames, language history, and word origins to general readers as well as specialists.
His life is also often mentioned in connection with literary history because his wife, Frieda Weekley, later left him and became the wife of D. H. Lawrence. Even so, Weekley’s lasting reputation rests on his own achievements: he was a careful and prolific student of language whose books helped generations of readers look more closely at where words come from.