Jeremy Butterfield

I love exploring language, and lots of my most vivid memories are linguistic. I blog regularly about diverse aspects of our wonderful shared language, English, at jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com.

I am immensely proud to be the editor of the latest edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which I've updated to reflect how English is used now, drawing on my experience as a lexicographer, linguist, and observer of English in use.

I can still remember being told, aged about three, what forget-me-nots were, and puzzling over the word's strange syntax. And the first word I learned in Spanish, aged 10, was 'cebolla'. Why? Because I was in Guatemala, where my father worked, and the cook was preparing 'sopa de cebollas' = onion soup. (Since then my Spanish vocab has increased enormously.)

For many years I worked as a 'harmless drudge', to borrow Dr Johnson's famous phrase, managing and helping create dictionaries of English and many other languages, including Spanish, and was ultimately Editor-in-Chief of Collins dictionaries.

Since then I've published Damp Squid: the English language laid bare, which analyses trends in English using mountains of data, and demolishes a few shibboleths (if one can demolish a shibboleth), and the Oxford A-Z of English Usage.