Joseph Wright FBA (31 October 1855 – 27 February 1930)[1] was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.

[1] He started work as a "donkey-boy" in a quarry around 1862, at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened.

"[4] By now a wool-sorter earning a pound a week, after 1870 Wright became increasingly fascinated with languages, and began attending night school to study French, German and Latin, as well as maths and shorthand.

A former pupil of Wright's recalled: "With a piece of chalk [he would] draw illustrative diagrams at the same time with each hand, and talk while he was doing it.

[5] Wright later returned to Heidelberg, and in 1885 he completed his PhD dissertation, Qualitative and Quantitative Changes of the Indo-Germanic Vowel System in Greek under Hermann Osthoff.

"[8][9] Wright's greatest achievement is considered to be the editing of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, which he published between 1898 and 1905, partly at his own expense.

[10] The Dictionary remains a definitive work, a snapshot of the dialects of spoken English in England at the end of the 19th century.

[citation needed] In the course of editing Dictionary (1898) Wright corresponded regularly with Thomas Hardy about the Dorset dialect.

She also wrote a book, Rustic Speech and Folklore (Oxford University Press 1913), in which she refers to their walking and cycling journeys in the Yorkshire Dales, as well as various articles and essays.

[5] Although his energies were for the most part directed into his work, Wright also enjoyed gardening, and followed Yorkshire cricket and football teams.

[4] At the age of seventy-four Wright succumbed to pneumonia and died at his home, "Thackley", 119 Banbury Road, Oxford, on 27 February 1930.

His pioneering work on the Windhill dialect inspired "a vigorous local monograph tradition... patterned after it.

[28]When in 1925 Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Wright wrote a letter of recommendation.

[29] Wright was greatly admired by Virginia Woolf, who wrote of him in her diary: The triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly for ever.

[30]Wright was Woolf's inspiration for the character of "Mr Brook" in The Pargiters, an early draft of The Years (1937).