Robert Burchfield

Robert Burchfield, who has died aged 81, was the editor of the
four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972-86), and
chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984; he
played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of
the English language, but his enthusiasm for the new sometimes enraged
traditionalists.

A New-Zealander by birth, Burchfield revelled in the flexibility of the
language, once describing it as "a monster accordion, stretchable at
the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib". He saw "standard English"
and "received pronunciation" as only a local, if once dominant, form of
a language which had become global and embraced many different strands,
each of which he regarded as democratically equal.

Burchfield broadened the scope of the OED to include words from many
Anglophone countries including North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. He also increased
coverage of demotic slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical
terms.

The first fruits of his appointment as editor of the Oxford English
Dictionaries appeared during the 1970s when, to the dismay of lexical
purists, Maori terms (for example, kete and pakeha) began to appear in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

He soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's
passions so much as words. He received anonymous death threats from
groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male
chauvinism from the language. One letter read: "You won't know where or
when, but you'll be dead."

He had to go to court to defend the OED's right to include pejorative
definitions of the word "Jew", on the ground that the function of a
dictionary is to describe language as it is, not as we may like it to
be. He had to fight legal battles over the right to include trademarks
and names, from Yale locks to WeightWatchers. He kept a file for what
he called the lunatic fringe: this included a letter from a man
imploring him to find a word for "a collector of fire helmets from all
over the world".

But the controversy over entries in the OED Supplement was as nothing
compared with the outcry over his revision of the grammatical bible
Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. Burchfield himself
admitted that he had "largely rewritten" Fowler, whom he described as
"a fossil". Yet even he must have been taken aback by the critical flak
which greeted his revision. One reviewer ventured that "Burchfield's
wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist
masterpiece have assured him a definite place in Hell".

Although Burchfield's Fowler contained much good advice (Richard
Ingrams and Jeanette Winterson were among a number of writers taken to
task for their dangling participles), and some reviewers applauded the
welcome he gave to non-standard constructions, others took exception to
what they saw as excessively permissive statements and lack of firm
guidance compared with earlier editions. Whereas the schoolmasterly
Fowler had defended standard English against invasion by the foreign
hordes, Burchfield saw it as merely the "language of the chattering
classes" and cited as many examples of American usage.

Robert William Burchfield was born on January 27 1923 at Wanganui on
the North Island of New Zealand, where his father ran the local power
station. There was only one book in the family home - a Socialist
tract. He was educated at Wanganui Technical College and at Victoria
University College, Wellington, where his studies were interrupted by
the outbreak of the Second World War.

It was the war, in which Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand
Artillery, that changed his life. While serving in Trieste, he
discovered a copy of Lancelot Hogben's Loom of Language, and was
captivated. After the war, he returned to complete his studies in
Wellington, then, in 1949, went on a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen
College, Oxford, to study English Language under J R R Tolkien and C S
Lewis.

Through their common interest in medieval literature he developed a
close friendship with Tolkien, whom he later described as "the
puckering fisherman who drew me into his philological net".

Immediately after graduation in 1952, Burchfield became a college
lecturer in English Language, first at Magdalen, then at Christ Church,
and later at St Peter's College, while studying for a doctorate on the
Ormulum, a 13th-century 20,000-line poem based on the Gospels.

While teaching at Oxford, he was encouraged by C T Onions, a former
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to become involved in
lexicography, and he assisted Onions on his Dictionary of English
Etymology (1966). When, in 1957, he was appointed editor of the
Supplement to the OED, the University Press reckoned he would need
seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, and
the four-volume supplement covered 6,000 pages.

Burchfield's team, in hallowed OED tradition, contained a fair number
of oddballs and eccentrics. One outside contributor worked from
Broadmoor and another from Parkhurst, where he had fetched up after
being arrested in the Bodleian Library. The novelist Julian Barnes was
employed for a time, as an "expert in sports and dirty words". He
recalled Burchfield's doubtful response to his efforts to include a
slang word for a supposedly popular form of sexual congress: "I'm
afraid, you know," Burchfield told him, "there isn't as much of this
about as you seem to think."

Burchfield's official retirement brought no slackening of pace, since
he was soon engrossed in Fowler. Among several other works, he wrote a
brief but informative history of The English Language (1985), published
a collection of essays, Unlocking the English Language (1991), and was
co-author of a report in 1979 on the quality of spoken English on BBC
radio.

Burchfield also wrote the preface for Caught in the Web of Words, a
biography of James A H Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, contributed to the Cambridge History of the English
Language, and published numerous scholarly essays. In the 1980s he
wrote a series on language, Sixth Sense, for The Daily Telegraph.

At Oxford, Burchfield became a tutorial fellow at Magdalen in 1963,
then a senior research fellow at St Peter's from 1979 to 1990. He was a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed
CBE in 1975.

He married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1976), Ethel Yates; they had a son
and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1976, Elizabeth Austen
Knight.