Benjamin Zimmer

Benjamin Zimmer is an American linguist and lexicographer. He is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He has previously served as editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

Career

Zimmer graduated from Yale University in 1992 with a B.A. degree in linguistics,^[1] and went on to study linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago.^[2] For his research on the languages of Indonesia, he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation,^[3] the Fulbright Program,^[4] and the Social Science Research Council.^[5] He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles^[6] and taught at Kenyon College and Rutgers University.^[2]

In 2005, Zimmer was named a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and became a regular contributor to Language Log, a group weblog on language and linguistics.^[7] He was named editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press in 2006,^[8] and the following year launched "From A to Zimmer," a weekly lexicography column on the OUP blog.^[9]

In 2008, Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc.^[10][11] He edits the content of the online magazine of the Visual Thesaurus and writes a regular column on word origins entitled "Word Routes."^[12]

Zimmer's writing on language has appeared in two blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs (Vintage, 2008, ISBN 978-0307278067)^[13][14] and Far from the Madding Gerund (William, James, 2006, ISBN 978-1590280553).^[15][16] He has also written for Slate^{[17][18][19][20]} and The Boston Globe.^[21] His research on word origins is frequently cited by William Safire's "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine.^{[22][23][24][25][26]}

In 2008 Zimmer began a four-year term on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.^[27] He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.^[28]

Family

Benjamin is the brother of science writer Carl Zimmer and the son of former New Jersey congressman Dick Zimmer.

Notes

External links

• Contributor profile, Language Log
• From A to Zimmer, OUPblog, Oxford University Press
• Contributor profile, Visual Thesaurus