Robert Burchfield: Robert Burchfield, who has died aged 81, was editor of the huge, four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary from 1957 to 1986. In that post he received many communications that went beyond outrage to the lunatic, and worse.
"You won't know where or when, but you'll be dead" was one such, indicating the feelings that language arouses. In this case, he suspected that the anonymous correspondent was a Middle East resident - Arab or Jew - who took exception to the OED's disinterested record of derogatory usage.
To a task that, over three decades, grew far beyond its modest intention, Burchfield brought a geniality which never deflected him from the cool and disciplined supervision of labour over so amorphous a subject as the evolution, around the world, of the English language in the tumultuous time since the 50-year work on the original, 12-volume dictionary was completed in 1933.
Burchfield's first, 1350-page volume (A-G) appeared in 1972. All sorts of overseas English words made appearances. Thus, too, were unveiled those four-letter coinings whose etymology his Victorian predecessors had diligently prepared, but had been unable to present to a public which, to judge by the explanatory citations, were more than familiar with them. Along with this, there was that perennial debate over which new words had made it in, and who was credited with first usage.
Among those to assist Burchfield was one J.P. Barnes, a graduate who sat in the Bodleian library in Oxford with a run of Autocar to nail down early instances of "gearbox" before baling out, as Julian Barnes, to journalism and to Flaubert's Parrot.
"Grotty", meanwhile, remains credited to the John Burke novelisation of the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day's Night rather than Alun Owen's original script; and "bate", meaning rage, is last recorded by the OED in 1690, overlooking the currency given it by Anthony Buckeridge in his Jennings novels: "Look out, old Wilkie's in a bate".
All this never fazed Burchfield, whose Forth-bridge task found him regularly called upon for comment about the passing scene. To his surprise and modest delight, he was something of a celebrity. The H-N volume appeared in 1976, O-Scz in 1982 and Se-Z in 1986.
Like James Murray, the OED's first editor, Burchfield came from humble origins. He was born in Wanganui, New Zealand, where his parents had but one book in the house, a socialist tract. Natural ability brought him a place at Wanganui Technical College from 1934 to 1939. Then came Victoria University College in Wellington.
He broke from his studies for wartime service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, two years of which were in Italy. This changed his life. In Trieste, he chanced upon Lancelot Hogben's The Loom Of Language, which gave him a relish for words and their origins.
Previously, he had thought himself to be "no artist, unable to play an instrument, I didn't feel sensitive enough to be a literature student". He returned to Wellington, completed his master's in 1948, won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1949 and graduated from Magdalen College Oxford in 1951 as one of a wave of New Zealand linguists. At Magdalen he had been under the tutelage of C.T. Onions and J.R.R. Tolkien.
From 1952 to 1953 he was a junior lecturer in English language and from 1953 to 1957 had a lectureship at Christ Church. He was also a lecturer at St Peter's College from 1955 to 1963, after which he became a fellow and tutor. He looked set for a quiet, married life, having married in 1949. But in 1957 he was offered the editing of the Supplement which, with academic posts, occupied him until 1986. Such is the march of language that his work is already subsumed and augmented in a 20-volume edition of the complete dictionary.
Meanwhile, he produced other, somewhat shorter volumes: the Oxford Dictionary Of English Etymology (1966, with Onions and G.W.S. Friedrichsen); The Quality Of Spoken English On BBC Radio (1979); The Spoken Language As An Art Form (1981); The Spoken Word (1981); The English Language (1985); the New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1986); Studies In Lexicography (1987); Unlocking The English Language (1989); Points Of View (1992); and Volume 5 of the Cambridge History Of The English Language in 1994.
Once retired from the OUP, as he characteristically put it, he assumed that the press thought "Burchfield's got nothing to do now. He can take on this task which has daunted everybody else." This was rewriting Fowler's English Usage. It is a subject on which everybody has opinions; fewer can sit down and produce a 900-page, double-columned volume with a tremendous range of neat quotations. The New Fowler's English Usage, third edition, was published in 1996. It showed no signs that it had been completed - as he candidly said - against the onset of Parkinson's Disease.
Brisker, less bufferish and funnier than Fowler himself, the new volume allowed freer rein (to the consternation of some) but, equally, was precise in setting right such people as Julian Barnes, who once admitted that his own wayward "rule is that if you've already got a 'this' doing business in the vicinity, use 'which' instead".
In fact, it is easy when you know how, and Burchfield is positively thrilling on the distinction between "shall" and "will". Long before the Rockies crumble, the English language will have changed beyond our imagining, but for now, and a considerable time to come, Burchfield's work will fuel that shoal of volumes bred by a whale of a dictionary which is relished by all who marvel at what words can do.
In 1976 he divorced, and remarried. His wife was Elizabeth Knight, who was a diligent assistant at their home south of Oxford. Elizabeth survives him, as do two daughters and a son from his first marriage.
Robert Burchfield: born January 29th, 1923; died July 5th, 2004