W(alter) W(illiam) Skeat

Philologist, born in London, UK. He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1860, and professor of Anglo-Saxon (1878). He was founder and first director of the Dialect Society (1873), and made a major contribution to English philology, editing several important texts. His main works include the Etymological English Dictionary (1879–82), Principles of English Etymology (1887–91), and Chaucer (6 vols, 1894–5).

Walter William Skeat (November 21, 1835 - 1912), English philologist, was born in London on the 21st of November 1835, and educated at King's College, Highgate Grammar School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. He completed Mitchell Kemble's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, and did much other work both in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic, but is perhaps most generally known for his labours in Middle English, and for his standard editions of Chaucer and Langland's Piers Plowman.

As he himself generously declared, he was at first mainly guided in the study of Chaucer by Henry Bradshaw, with whom he was to have participated in the edition of Chaucer planned in 1870 by the University of Oxford, having declined in Bradshaw's favour an offer of the editorship made to himself. He also issued an edition of Chaucer in one volume for general readers, and a separate edition of his Treatise on the Astrolabe, with a learned commentary. For the Scottish Text Society he edited The Kingis Quair, usually ascribed to James I of Scotland, and he published an edition (2 vols., 1871) of Chatterton, with an investigation of the sources of the obsolete words employed by him.

In pure philology, Skeat's principal achievement is his Etymological English Dictionary (4 parts, 1879-1882;

His other works include:

Specimens of English from 1394 to 1597 (1871) Specimens of Early English from 1298 to 1393 (1872), in conjunction with Richard Morris Principles of English Etymology (2 series, 1887 and 1891) A Concise Dictionary of Middle English (1888), in conjunction with AL Mayhew A Student's Pastime (1896), a volume of essays The Chaucer Canon (1900) A Primer of Classical and English Philology (1905)