Sol Steinmetz

Who was Sol Steinmetz?

Sol Steinmetz was a Hungarian American linguistics and lexicography expert who wrote extensively about etymologies, definitions and uncovered earliest recorded usages of words in English and Yiddish. A widely sought source on all things lexical, he earned recognition from William Safire in his On Language column in The New York Times Magazine in 2006 as a "lexical supermaven".

Steinmetz was born in Budapest on July 29, 1930, and emigrated from Hungary before the outbreak of World War II to the United States with brief intervals spent in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. He earned his undergraduate degree from Yeshiva University with a major in English and received his semikhah from YU's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He supported himself as a hazzan while he studied linguistics at Columbia University where he trained under Yiddish scholar Uriel Weinreich, before leaving graduate school to take a post as rabbi of a synagogue in Media, Pennsylvania.

He worked for publishers Merriam-Webster and Clarence Barnhart before moving to Random House, where he oversaw Random House Webster's College Dictionary as the executive editor of the firm's dictionary division. As part of his lexicographical research, he found such first uses as the sense of the metonymous use of the word "suit" to mean a bureaucrat which he found attributed to a 1982 episode of Cagney and Lacey.