Robert Payne Smith (7 November 1818 – 31 March 1895) was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church from 1865 until 1870, when he was appointed Dean of Canterbury by Queen Victoria on the advice of William Ewart Gladstone.

[1] Payne Smith was born in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, on 7 November 1818, the only son and second of four children of Robert Smith, a land agent, and his wife, Esther Argles Payne, of Leggsheath, Surrey.

He attended Chipping Campden Grammar School and was taught Hebrew by his eldest sister, Esther.

[4] His greatest work, however, was his editorship for the Oxford University Press of the great of Syriac-Latin lexicon, the Thesaurus Syriacus (1868–1901), on which he worked from its conception until his death when the editorship of the Thesaurus passed to his daughter, Jessie Payne Margoliouth,[5] who abridged it into a Syriac-English dictionary, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (1903), and who late in life published the Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith (1927).

He died at his deanery on 31 March 1895 and was buried on 3 April in St Martin's churchyard, Canterbury.