Elizabeth Gidley Withycombe (15 June 1902 – 12 November 1993) is the compiler of The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names, first published by the Clarendon Press in 1945 and in multiple editions since.
[2] Her father was a painter, John Withycombe, and her mother was Ellen Hannah Bell.
She is best known as the compiler of The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names, published by the Clarendon Press in 1945, and in a second edition in 1950 and a third in 1977.
Betty Withycombe has been described as a mentor to the Australian writer Patrick White who was her father's cousin and who stayed with the Withycombes when he was writing his first book of poems, Thirteen Poems in 1927-29 when he was aged 15–17 and she was in her mid twenties.
In 1977 White asked her to return the approximately 400 letters that he had sent to her, on the pretext that they would help him write The Twyburn Affair, but he subsequently burned them.