Elisabeth Piirainen, (née Dörrie, born 1943 in Hannover, – December 29, 2017),[1] was a German linguist and philologist.
Afterwards she worked as an editor for German Language at the University of Jyväskylä located in central Finland.
In 1963 she met the Finnish scholar of German language, Ilpo Tapani Piirainen, and married him in 1967.
Fifty of her publications related to proverbs are listed by Wolfgang Mieder in his two-volume bibliography on paremiology and phraseology.
The breadth of her contribution and its impact was described soon after her death, "The fascinating world of widespread idioms: A tribute to Elisabeth Piirainen (1943-2017)".