[4] Sweet neglected his formal academic coursework, concentrating instead on pursuing excellence in his private studies.

[4] Early recognition came in his first year at Oxford, when the prestigious Philological Society (of which he was later to become president) published a paper of his on Old English.

"[6] In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe.

[1] Other books by Sweet include An Icelandic Primer with Grammar, Notes and Glossary (1886), The History of Language (1900[9]), and a number of other works he edited for the Early English Text Society.

He had done poorly as a student at Oxford, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, and he failed to make every effort to gather official support.

In Who's Who, 1911, Sweet gave his recreations as: Climbing, gardening, chemistry, alphabets, in boyhood; swimming, skating, European languages and literatures, in youth; riding, fishing, cycling, literary controversy, spelling and university reform, oriental languages and literatures, in middle age; sociology, spiritualism, music, literary composition, in old age—looked forward to flying: real flying, not with bags and stoves!

[4] His work established an applied linguistics tradition in language teaching which has continued without interruption to the present day.