Robert Burchfield, a daring and innovative lexicographer who was chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984, has died at the age of 81, Oxford University Press said on Tuesday.
New Zealand-born Burchfield died on July 5 in Oxfordshire, central England, a spokesperson said. No cause of death was given.
From a young age, Burchfield loved the English language, which he once described as ”a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib”.
His interest in all brands of English went into the Oxford English Dictionaries, which he broadened to include words from North America, Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, as well as his native land.
In the 1970s, he included a number of Maori words in the Concise Oxford Dictionary — and received anonymous death threats from those wanting to suppress racial vocabulary.
He went to court to defend the Oxford English Dictionaries‘ right to include pejorative definitions of the word ”Jew”, arguing that a dictionary describes language as it is, not as we would like it to be.
And he fought with their holders to include trademarks such as Yale locks and the Weight Watchers slimming club.
Burchfield was strongly criticised for his more relaxed reworking of that grammar bible, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, published in 1996. One reviewer said his ”wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist masterpiece have assured him a definite place in hell”.
During World War II, Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand Artillery, and while working in Trieste, he was taken with a copy of Lancelot Hogben’s Loom of Language.
After the war, he completed his studies at Victoria University College in Wellington before taking up a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied English language under JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.
He later taught English language at Oxford while he completed a doctorate.
CT Onions, a former Oxford English Dictionaries editor, encouraged his interest in lexicography, and Burchfield helped Onions on his Dictionary of English Etymology, published in 1966.
In 1957, Burchfield was appointed editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionaries: the four volumes took him 29 years and covered 6 000 pages.
Burchfield also wrote a biography of James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries.
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1975 was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire.
He is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth, and a son and two daughters from his first marriage. The funeral will be held at St Peter’s College chapel, Oxford, on June 12. — Sapa-AP