author
Sir William A. (William Alexander) Craigie
1867–1957
A master of words and word history, this Scottish scholar helped shape the Oxford English Dictionary and brought the same deep curiosity to Scottish and American English. His work opened up the story of language for generations of readers and researchers.
1 Audiobook
The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia
by Sir William A. (William Alexander) Craigie
About the author
Born in Dundee in 1867, Sir William Alexander Craigie was a Scottish philologist and lexicographer whose career was devoted to the history of words. He studied at the University of St Andrews and later became one of the key editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, eventually serving as its third editor and helping prepare the 1933 supplement.
Craigie was also an important scholar of older and regional forms of English. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and he played a major role in the study of Scots, including the long-term project that became the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. His interests reached beyond Britain as well: he later worked on the Historical Dictionary of American English.
What makes Craigie especially interesting is the range of his scholarship. He was not simply collecting definitions, but tracing how language lived, changed, and traveled across centuries and places. He died in 1957, leaving behind a body of work that still matters to anyone curious about the history of English.