Henry Watson Fowler
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.
* Jenny McMorris,
The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler (
Oxford University Press, 2001) ISBN 0198662548
*
Free ebook of Henry Watson Fowler at
Project Gutenberg
