Whitney, William Dwight

Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Yale. He was outstanding among American Orientalists and philologists and wrote A Sanskrit Grammar (1879) and Language and the Study of Language (1867). He was also brilliantly successful as editor of The Century Dictionary.

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Whitney, William Dwight (1827–94) philologist, lexicographer; born in Northampton, Mass. After graduating from Williams College (1845), and working briefly as a bank teller, he studied languages at the University of Breslau (Ph.D. 1861). He taught Sanskrit at Yale and was appointed head of both that department and the modern language department. 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 (1869) and edited the 6-volume Century Dictionary (1889–91). 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. Recognizing the central importance of usage in governing language change, he was one of the first modern grammarians. His Essentials of English Grammar (1877), although never as popular as some other 19th-century grammars, is widely regarded as a pathbreaking work.