Harold Orton (23 October 1898 – 7 March 1975) was a British dialectologist and professor of English language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds.
[2] After leaving the army, in 1918 Orton went to Merton College, Oxford,[3] where he studied under Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld and Joseph Wright, author of the English Dialect Dictionary (McDavid, 1976).
[4] Orton became head of the Department of English Language at the University of Sheffield in 1939 but secondment to the British Council interrupted that work until the end of World War II.
[2] His pupil David Parry went on to apply the same principles used for the SED to Welsh English, founding the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD) at Swansea University in 1968.
[7] An overview of Orton's career was published by Craig Fees in 1991 as the first part in a series on dialect and folk studies.