About

Jesse Sheidlower is currently Editor at Large (North America) of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he has been since 1999. His current responsibilities focus chiefly on the revision of American and Canadian entries for the OED. Before that, he was an editor in the Random House Reference Department, specializing in slang and new words. While there he was also project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

He has written about language for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, and various scholarly journals, including American Speech, Dictionaries (journal of the Dictionary Society of North America), and The Journal of English Linguistics. He is a regular contributor to Slate, and is frequently quoted in the press on language matters.

He was graduated with special honors in English from the University of Chicago, and did graduate work in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University.

He lives in Manhattan.

Personal

In general, he is not a fan of using "About" pages to discuss personal information that most people probably don't care about. However, it seems to be the thing, at least to a certain extent, so, in brief, and shifting to the first person:

Sport. I rowed for the University of Chicago Crew and the First and Third Trinty Boat Club. I think it is the greatest sport, and wish I could continue, but "New York [is] a terrible place in which to row singles". I also am a long-time cyclist, though can't quite manage the endurance feats of my youth, and don't race often nowadays. A long-term achilles tendon injury keeps me from running, which I'm upset about. I play squash very badly, but enjoy it.

Food and Wine. I enjoy cooking, with a particular emphasis on extremely elaborate dinner parties. (See this article for some press coverage, and some overly polite quotes from impressive food-world guests.) I also like wine, particularly German whites and red Burgundy. Lately I've been getting into bread-baking.

Computing. I like programming and fiddling with computers. I use the FreeBSD and Linux operating systems, use Emacs, and write most of my code in Perl. I am, undeservedly, part of the core development group of the Catalyst Web Framework, a major platform for web development in Perl that is now widely used around the world. I like other computer geeks.

Music. I like guitar, especially 1960s British fingerstyle guitar (John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Davey Graham). I revere Richard Thompson. I am not ashamed to admit that I like Jethro Tull and Rush. I play guitar extremely poorly, but care greatly about the guitar as instrument, and think that the lightly-braced 12-fret Martins from the late 1920s are the best guitars ever made.