Eric Honeywood Partridge (
February 6, 1894 –
June 1, 1979) was a noted
New Zealand/
British lexicographer of the
English language, particularly of its slang.
Partridge was born near Waimata Valley, Gisborne, on the North Island of New Zealand to John Thomas Partridge, a grazier, and his wife Ethel Norris. In 1907 the family moved to Brisbane, Australia, where he was educated at the Toowoomba Grammar School. He then studied first Classics and then French and English at the University of Queensland. During this time Partridge also taught for three years as a school teacher before serving in the Australian infantry during the First World War, living through the horror of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. His interest in slang and the "underside" of language is said to date from his wartime experience. He finally received his BA in 1921.
After receiving his degree, he became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on both an MA on eighteenth-century English romantic poetry, and a B.Litt in comparative literature. He subsequently taught in a grammar school in Lancashire for a brief interval, then took lecturing positions at the Universities of Manchester (1925-6) and London (1926-7). In 1925 he married Agnes Dora Vye-Parminter, with whom he had a daughter. In 1927 he founded the Scholartis Press, which he managed until it closed in 1931. He then became a full-time writer, occupying the same desk (K1) in the British Library almost daily for the next fifty years. His first major work on slang, Slang Today and Yesterday, appeared in 1933, and his well-known Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English followed in 1937. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the army education corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II. Partridge died in Moretonhampstead, Devon, in 1979.
Partridge wrote over forty books on the English language, including well-known works on etymology and slang. He also wrote novels under the pseudonym Corrie Denison, and on tennis, which he played well. His papers are archived at the University of Birmingham, British Library, King's College, Cambridge, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the University of Exeter, the University of San Francisco, Warwickshire Record Office, and William Salt Library.
