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Joseph Wright FBA (1855 – 27 February 1930) was an English philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University.

Early life
Born in Thackley, near Bradford in Yorkshire, the seventh son of a navvy, he started work as a "donkey-boy" at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to be sharpened at the smithy and then back to the quarry where they were needed. He later became a "doffer" – responsible for removing full bobbins – in a Yorkshire mill. Although he learnt his letters and numbers at the Salt's Factory School, he was unable to read a newspaper until he was 15. He later said of this time, "Reading and writing, for me, were as remote as any of the sciences".

By now a wool-sorter earning £1 a week, Wright became increasingly fascinated with languages and started attending night-school in order to learn French, German and Latin, as well as maths and shorthand. At the age of 18 he even started his own night-school, charging his colleagues twopence a week.

By 1876 he had saved £40 and could afford a term's study at the University of Heidelberg, although he walked from Antwerp to save money. He later returned to Heidelberg and completed a Ph.D. on Qualitative and Quantitative Changes of the Indo-Germanic Vowel System in Greek in 1885.

Career
In 1888, after his return from Germany, Wright was offered a post at Oxford University by Professor Max Müller, and became a lecturer to the Association for the Higher Education of Women and deputy lecturer in German at the Taylor Institution.

From 1891 to 1901 he was Deputy Professor and from 1901 to 1925 Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford.

He specialised in the Germanic languages and wrote a range of introductory grammars for Old English, Middle English, Old High German, Middle High German and Gothic which were still being revised and reprinted 50 years after his death. He also published a historical grammar of German.

He had a strong interest in English dialects and claimed that his 1893 Windhill Dialect Grammar was "the first grammar of its kind in England." Undoubtedly, his greatest achievement was the editing of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, which he published between 1898 and 1905, initially at his own expense. This remains a definitive work, a snapshot of English dialect speech at the end of the 19th century. In the course of his work on the Dictionary, he formed a committee to gather Yorkshire material, which gave rise in 1897 to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, which claims to be the world's oldest surviving dialect society. He was the author of the Dialect Test. Wright had been offered a position at a Canadian university, who would have paid him an annual salary of £500 – a very generous salary at the time. However, Wright opted to stay in Oxford and finish the Dialect Dictionary without any financial backing from a sponsor.

Wright's papers are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Personal life
In 1896 he married Elizabeth Mary Lea (1863-1958), with whom he co-authored his Old and Middle English Grammars. She also wrote the book, Rustic Speech and Folklore (Oxford University Press 1913), in which she makes reference to their various walking and cycle trips into the Yorkshire Dales, as well as various articles and essays.

The couple had two children – Willie Boy and Mary – both of whom died in childhood.

Wright and his wife were known for their hospitality to their students and would often invite a dozen or more, both men and women, to their home for Yorkshire Sunday teas. On these occasions Wright would perform his party trick of making his Aberdeen Terrier, Jack, lick his lips when Wright said the Gothic words for fig-tree – smakka bagms.

Although his energies were for the most part directed towards his work, Wright also enjoyed gardening and followed Yorkshire cricket and football teams.

Elizabeth survived him and wrote a biography, The Life of Joseph Wright.

Legacy
Wright was an important early influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, and was one of his tutors at Oxford: studying the Grammar of the Gothic Language with Wright seems to have been a turning-point in Tolkien's life.

In the course of editing the Dictionary he corresponded regularly with Thomas Hardy.

Wright was greatly admired by Virginia Woolf, who writes of him in her diary that, "The triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly for ever. Everybody knows now about dialect, owing to his dixery." He was the inspiration for the character of Mr Brook in The Pargiters, an early draft of The Years.