William Thoms

William John Thoms (16 November 1803 – 15 August 1885) was a British writer credited with coining the term "folklore" in 1846.

Thoms worked as an antiquary, and miscellaneous writer, for many years a clerk in the secretary's office of Chelsea Hospital.

Charles Wentworth Dilke, the publisher of the Athenaeum encouraged Thoms to begin a new journal, Notes and Queries, which was launched in 1849.

[5] This corpus has been hailed as one of Thoms's "foremost achievements: the importance of which is "heightened by the absence of any national folklore archive in England".

[6] His early attempt to produce a collection of folk tales, advertised as "Folk-Lore of England", did not appear, but his later antiquarian publications sometimes reprinted his articles and material from subscribers.

In July 1876, in response to a letter sent to Notes and Queries, Thoms replied by suggesting that "steps should be taken to form a society for collecting, arranging, and printing all the scattered bits of folk-lore which we read of in books and hear of in the flesh".