John Simpson (lexicographer) - The OED

The OED

John Simpson joined the editorial staff of the OED in 1976 to work on the Supplement to the OED. He was Co-Editor of the Second Edition of the OED, published in 1989, and was appointed Chief Editor in 1993.

The Second Edition of the OED was the first version of the dictionary to be published from machine-readable text. In the early 1990s John Simpson led the editorial team in the development of new editorial policies and procedures for the comprehensive revision of the dictionary in its Third Edition, of which the first updated and revised entries were published in 2000. Under his editorship the OED has moved from being a printed reference text for the meaning, origin and development of individual words to a continually updated, searchable database for exploring the English language across the globe and over the centuries.

John Simpson is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He is also a member of the Philological Society, where the idea of the Dictionary was first proposed in the 1850s.

The OED is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive dictionary, but in the absence of an academy or other regulatory body for the English language, the Chief Editor is frequently asked to act as an authority on the language and its usage, and to represent it on the international stage. John Simpson is a founder member of the European Federation of National Institutions for Language and has been a member of its Executive Committee since 2003.

As an acknowledged expert on historical lexicography he has acted as an adviser to a number of other national dictionaries, including the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano and the Australian National Dictionary. In 1999 he was awarded an honorary D.Litt by the Australian National University for his 'distinguished creative achievement as a scholar in lexicography'.

As well as his work on the OED, John Simpson has edited the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (1982) and co-edited the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992). He has also written introductions to Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604), B.E.'s Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699) and Francis Grose's Popular Superstitions (1787), published by the Bodleian Library. He co-edits James Joyce Online Notes, a forum for the publication of documentary evidence about the people, words and cultural references in James Joyce's fiction.