Henry Watson Fowler
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Henry Watson Fowler (10 March 1858 – 26 December 1933) was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on usage of English. He is notable for both Fowler's Modern English Usage and his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
Born in Tonbridge, Kent, Fowler graduated from Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, and then spent seventeen years teaching English grammar at a secondary school in Yorkshire. He then went to London and worked as a freelance journalist.
In 1903 he moved to the island of Guernsey, where he worked with his brother Francis George Fowler on The King's English (1906), a work with the purpose of encouraging writers to be more simple and direct in their style. Fowler and his younger brother volunteered for service in the British army in 1914, with the 56-year-old Henry lying about his age. The pair began work on Fowler's Modern English Usage before the end of the war.
Francis died of tuberculosis in 1918, and Henry Fowler's book of English usage — which was dedicated to his brother — was published in 1926. Both The King's English and English Usage remain in print today, the latter having been revised in 1965 and, more extensively, in 1996, by Sir Ernest Gowers and Robert Burchfield respectively.
Following the death of its original editor, Fowler helped complete work on the first edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, under the editorship of C.T. Onions.
Reference
- Jenny McMorris, The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler (Oxford University Press, 2001) ISBN 0198662548