John Frederick Stanford (1815–1880)[1] was an English barrister, literary scholar and politician.
[2] Stanford was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1841, was called to the bar in 1844, and that year became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Stanford left £5,000 to the University of Cambridge which went to support the creation of a dictionary of anglicised words which was finally published as Charles Fennell's Stanford Dictionary of Anglicised Words and Phrases.
[5] The project was intended to complete his own Etymological Dictionary dealing with words and phrases from other languages adopted in English, a work that had consumed Stanford in the final years of his life.
[6] Stanford had struggled to find a home for the project: it had been rejected by the Philological Society in the 1870s[7] and, when it was offered to Cambridge, Edward Byles Cowell, Walter Skeat and Aldis Wright all considered that the bequest should be rejected, but they were not in the majority when it came to a vote.