About

Jesse Sheidlower is currently Editor at Large 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.

Though he is not in general a fan of using "About" pages to discuss personal information, he feels obligated to mention that his interests include rowing (which he regrets being no longer able to do, but "New York [is] a terrible place in which to row singles"); cycling; cooking and wine; bespoke tailoring; various computing activities, especially involving Perl, Emacs, and Unix-derived operating systems; and guitar, especially 1960s British fingerstyle guitar (and feels further obligated to express his feeling that 12-fret Martins from the late 1920s are the best guitars ever made).