He served in the British Army during the Second World War, including working in intelligence at Bletchley Park.
Only two years later, in 1948, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as its first Forbes Professor of English Language and General Linguistics.
He remained at Edinburgh until retirement, and then served as director of the Middle English Dialect Atlas Project from 1979 to 1986.
[5][2] Having received a Harmsworth Scholarship, he studied for a diploma in comparative philology at Merton College, Oxford, which he completed in 1936.
[1] With his linguistic training, he was involved in decrypting German military communication and helping crack Enigma codes.
[4] McIntosh began his academic career in 1938, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, as a lecturer in the Department of English, University College, Swansea.
[5] Rather than stay at Oxford, however, McIntosh moved to the University of Edinburgh as its first Forbes Professor of English Language and General Linguistics in 1948.
[2][9] His research interests included philology and historical linguistics relating to both Middle English and Scots.
[6] In 1978, McIntosh was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), Scotland's national academy of science and letters.
[1] One was titled So Meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh (1981).