Peter Gilliver

Who is Peter Gilliver?

Peter Gilliver is a lexicographer and Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; as of 2013, he is responsible for the largest three or four entries in the current electronic revision, including the largest. His parents were both linguists. He attended Barnard Castle School, and has a degree in Mathematics from Jesus College, Cambridge, and a qualification in Information Science from Liverpool.

Gilliver is working on a history of the OED, and travels to lecture on this and related subjects.

He and his partner sing in various choirs, including the Oxford Bach Choir, and Fiori Musicali.

Gilliver, a longtime editor who also seems to be the OED’s resident historian, points out that the dictionary feels obliged to include words that many would regard simply as misspellings. No one is particularly proud of the new entry as of December 2003 for nucular, a word not associated with high standards of diction. “Bizarrely, I was amazed to find that the spelling n-u-c-u-l-a-r has decades of history,” Gilliver says. “And that is not to be confused with the quite different word, nucular, meaning ’of or relating to a nucule.’”