Whitney, William Dwight (1827–1894)

US philologist and lexicographer. He translated the Vedas (the ancient Hindu sacred scriptures), authored a Sanskrit grammar, and contributed to an important Sanskrit dictionary. He served as the first president of the American Philological Association (from 1869) and edited the six-volume Century Dictionary (1889–91). Recognizing the central importance of usage in governing language change, he was one of the first modern grammarians.

Whitney was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Williams College in 1845, he worked briefly as a bank teller. He studied languages at the University of Breslau, Germany (modern-day Wroclaw, Poland), gaining his PhD in 1861. He taught Sanskrit at Yale University and was appointed head of both that department and the modern language department. His interest in the origin and growth of languages, as detailed in his Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875), helped popularize the study of language. His Essentials of English Grammar (1877), although never as popular as some other 19th-century grammars, is widely regarded as a groundbreaking work.