Robert Burchfield, edited dictionary

In the 1970s, he included a number of words in Maori -- the language of the people native to New Zealand -- in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and he received anonymous death threats from those wanting to suppress racially or ethnically sensitive vocabulary.

He went to court to defend the OED's right to include derogatory terms, arguing that a dictionary describes language as it is, not as readers would like it to be.

He also fought to include trademarks such as Yale locks and the Weight Watchers diet program.

Mr. Burchfield was strongly criticized for his more relaxed reworking of that grammar bible, Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. One reviewer said his "wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist masterpiece have assured him a definite place in hell."

During World War II, Mr. Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand Artillery. While working in Trieste, he was taken with a copy of Lancelot Hogben's "Loom of Language."

After the war, he completed his studies at Victoria University College in Wellington before taking up a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied English language under J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

He later taught English at Oxford while he completed a doctorate.

C.T. Onions, a former OED editor, encouraged his interest in lexicography, and Mr. Burchfield helped Onions on his Dictionary of English Etymology, published in 1966.

In 1957, Mr. Burchfield was appointed editor of the supplement to the OED: the four volumes took him 29 years and covered 6,000 pages.

Mr. Burchfield also wrote a biography of James Murray, the first editor of the OED.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1975 was a Companion of the Order of the British Empire.

He leaves his second wife, Elizabeth, and a son and two daughters from his first marriage. The funeral will be held Monday in St. Peter's College chapel, Oxford.