William Adolphus Wheeler

William Adolphus Wheeler (November 14, 1833 Leicester, Massachusetts - October 28, 1874 Roxbury, Massachusetts) was a United States lexicographer.

Biography

Wheeler grew up in Topsham, Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College (A.B. 1853; A.M. 1856).[1] He taught school a few years, and became Joseph Emerson Worcester's assistant in compiling his quarto dictionary,[2] published in 1860.[1] To the appendix of this work he contributed a table entitled “Pronunciation of the Names of Distinguished Men of Modern Times.” Subsequently, with Richard Soule, he prepared the book known as Worcester's Spelling Book.[2] He was employed as general reviser of the edition of Noah Webster's dictionary published in 1864, and contributed to it an “Explanatory and Pronouncing Vocabulary of the Names of Noted Fictitious Persons and Places,” which was enlarged and published separately (Boston and London, 1865).[1][2] He had been from 1868 assistant superintendent of the Boston Public Library,[2] where he superintended the catalogue department.[3]

Works

Besides the publications cited above, he revised and edited Charles Hole's Brief Biographical Dictionary (1866), and the Dickens Dictionary (1873),[4] and began a Cyclopædia of Shakespearian Literature.[2] He edited Mother Goose Melodies (with antiquarian and philological notes, 1869).[3] He left unfinished an index to the principal works of ancient and modern literature, to be entitled Who Wrote It?[2] This was completed by C. G. Wheeler, and published in 1881.[4] He edited Familiar Allusions (1882).[4]

gollark: As planned.
gollark: Reject precedence, return to RPN.
gollark: Although that's really a fault of the grammar I guess.
gollark: Apart from the bit where it can't parse negative integer literals due to ambiguity.
gollark: Recursive descent worked fine for my lisp thing.

References
  1. Miles L. Hanley (1936). "Wheeler, William Adolphus". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
  2.  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Ripley, George; Dana, Charles A., eds. (1879). "Wheeler, William Adolphus" . The American Cyclopædia.
  3. Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Wheeler, William Adolphus" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
  4. Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Wheeler, William Adolphus" . Encyclopedia Americana.
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