author
Sir William A. (William Alexander) Craigie
1867–1957
A brilliant word scholar from Scotland, he helped shape the Oxford English Dictionary and spent decades tracing how English changed across centuries and continents.
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 became closely tied to some of the biggest dictionary projects in the English-speaking world. He studied at the University of St Andrews and went on to become one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, later serving as its third editor and helping prepare the 1933 supplement.
Craigie was also Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1916 to 1925. After that he worked at the University of Chicago, where he led the Historical Dictionary of American English, bringing the same careful, historical approach to American usage that had shaped the OED.
He was knighted in 1928, the same year the original OED was completed, and he continued working on language scholarship well beyond formal retirement. He died in 1957, remembered as a patient, wide-ranging scholar whose work helped readers see English as a living record of history.