Eilert Ekwall

Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall (8 January 1877 in Vallsjö – 23 November 1964 in Lund) was a Swedish academic, Professor of English at Sweden's Lund University from 1909 to 1942 and one of the outstanding scholars of the English language in the first half of the 20th century.

The Dictionary remained the standard national reference resource for over 40 years, and is still valuable even though some aspects of Ekwall's methodology and some of his ideas are no longer accepted.

He was competent not only in English philology, but also in Scandinavian and Celtic, making him ideally qualified as an authority on linguistic aspects of the place-names of England.

Ekwall also left behind an extensive body of influential academic articles and notes (many collected in the books of 1931 and 1936 mentioned above), local working papers of Lund University, and a very large number of book reviews, all published over a period of some 60 years, in English, Swedish and German, and mostly referenced in von Feilitzen's bibliography.

He and his wife Dagny founded a bursary for students at Lund University from the Småland region.