The lexicographer Frederic Cassidy, who died on June 14th aged 92, described himself as a lexicolator or "word worshipper". He adored words and phrases - or folk idioms - made up by ordinary people to describe events around them. He specialised in finding the most exotic, and delighted in the strange sounds and often onomatopoeic quality of expressions rarely found in orthodox dictionaries.
Two favourites were "honeyfuggle", a Kentucky word for flattering sweet talk, and a "flang dang", a Texan description of a loud party with music.
A white Jamaican, who moved to the US as a child, he was as highly regarded as James Murray, the Scottish philologist who edited what became the Oxford English Dictionary. He spent decades collecting and investigating words and phrases in regional America for what was to become a five-volume work, the Dictionary of American Regional English, of which he became editor in the 1960s.
He expected to complete it by the end of the century, but, by last year, had only produced three volumes. Lexicography, he noted, "is not a rapid science". Volume IV is expected in 2002 under the editorship of his successor, Joan Houston Hall, and Volume V in 2007. It will have covered 70,000 words and meanings with annotations on their origins and history.
Frederic Cassidy began with a list of 40,000 words, amassed over the decades by members of the American Dialect Society. He then spread the search to all 50 states, with researchers interviewing 2,752 people in 1,002 communities over five years. This was necessary because the team found that people were not always aware that words or phrases they used were local and specialised.
A personal favourite of his appeared in a suburban Philadelphia newspaper, in an article about police troubles with "hoofties". The lexicolator traced its origins to the area's German community, and the word in German, hufte, which means hip. He concluded that "hoofties" were "hippies".
He rejected arguments that his folk idioms were not real words - because they were not standard - as little more than snobbery. "If a meaning is communicated," he wrote, "the word is real." And if he ever encountered a word with curious origins, he would say with relish: "Let's look it up."
The son of an accountant father and university professor mother, he grew up in Kingston, speaking two languages, standard English at home and Jamaican Creole in the community. When he was 11, the family moved to Akron, Ohio, and he gained a bachelor's degree in 1930, and a master's in 1932, from Oberlin College. In 1938, he received a Ph.D from the University of Michigan.
He began teaching English literature in 1939 at the University of Wisconsin and, although he retired a decade ago, he retained an office there. His wife,Helene Lucile Monod, whom he met as a fellow student in Michigan, died in 1980. The couple had four children.
Frederic George Cassidy: born 1907; died, June 2000