Peter Gilliver (born 14 June 1964) is a lexicographer and Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; as of 2013, he is responsible for the largest three or four entries in the current electronic revision, including the largest (that for "run"). His parents were both linguists. He attended Barnard Castle School, and has a degree in Mathematics from Jesus College, Cambridge, and a qualification in Information Science from Liverpool.
Gilliver is working on a history of the OED, and travels to lecture on this and related subjects.
He and his partner sing in various choirs, including the Oxford Bach Choir (which they helped to administer for some years), and Fiori Musicali.
Gilliver, a longtime editor who also seems to be the OED’s resident historian, points out that the dictionary feels obliged to include words that many would regard simply as misspellings. No one is particularly proud of the new entry as of December 2003 for nucular, a word not associated with high standards of diction. “Bizarrely, I was amazed to find that the spelling n-u-c-u-l-a-r has decades of history,” Gilliver says. “And that is not to be confused with the quite different word, nucular, meaning ’of or relating to a nucule.’”
— Cyber-neologoliferation, James Gleick, New York Times, 2006
Famous quotes containing the word peter:
“It is a necessary condition of one’s ascribing states of consciousness, experiences, to oneself, in the way one does, that one should also ascribe them, or be prepared to ascribe them, to others who are not oneself.... The ascribing phrases are used in just the same sense when the subject is another as when the subject is oneself.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)