Henry Watson Fowler

Henry Watson Fowler (10 March 1858 – 26 December 1933) was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the 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 Latin, Greek, and English at Sedbergh School. He then worked as a freelance journalist in London.

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 meant to encourage writers to be stylistically simple and direct. In 1914, Fowler and his younger brother volunteered for service in the British army; to gain acceptance, the 56-year-old Henry lied about his age. The pair began work on Fowler's Modern English Usage before the end of the war. In 1918, forty-seven-year-old Francis died of tuberculosis "contracted during service with the B.E.F.," and it is to him that Henry Fowler dedicated Modern English usage when it was published in 1926.

Currently, The King's English and Modern English Usage remain in print, the latter having been updated by Sir Ernest Gowers for the second edition (1965). The third edition (1996), is Robert Burchfield's extensive rewriting of the original that shifts the book's function from Fowler's largely prescriptive approach to one more descriptive. A Pocket edition (ISBN 0-19-860947-7) edited by Robert Allen, based on Burchfield's edition, is available on-line, to subscribers to the Oxford Reference On-line Premium collection.

On the death of its original editor, Fowler helped complete the first edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, under the editorship of C.T. Onions.