Robert Burchfield, 81; Scholar of English

Robert Burchfield, an innovative lexicographer who was chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984, has died, the Oxford University Press announced Tuesday. He was 81.

Burchfield died Monday in Oxfordshire, a spokeswoman said. No cause of death was announced.

From an early age, the New Zealand-born Burchfield loved the English language, which he once described as “a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”

His interest in all brands of English went into the Oxford English Dictionaries, which he broadened to include words from North America, Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, as well as his native land.

In the 1970s, he included a number of words in Maori -- the language of the people native to New Zealand -- in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and he received anonymous death threats from those wanting to suppress racially or ethnically sensitive vocabulary.

He went to court to defend the right to include derogatory terms, arguing that a dictionary describes language as it is, not as readers would like it to be.

He also fought to include trademarks such as Yale locks and the Weight Watchers diet program.

Burchfield drew strong criticism for his more relaxed reworking of the grammar bible Fowler’s Modern English Usage, published in 1996. One reviewer said his “wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist masterpiece have assured him a definite place in hell.”

During World War II, Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand Artillery. While working in Trieste, Italy, he was taken with a copy of Lancelot Hogben’s “Loom of Language.”

After the war, he completed his studies at Victoria University College in Wellington, New Zealand, before becoming a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, where he studied the English language under J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Burchfield later taught English at Oxford while he completed a doctorate.

In 1957, Burchfield was appointed editor of the supplement to the OED: The four volumes took him 29 years and covered 6,000 pages.

C.T. Onions, a former OED editor, encouraged his interest in lexicography, and Burchfield helped Onions on his Dictionary of English Etymology, published in 1966.

Burchfield also wrote a biography of James Murray, the first editor of the OED.

Burchfield was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1975 was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire.

He is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth, and a son and two daughters from his first marriage. The funeral will be held at St. Peter’s College chapel in Oxford on Monday.