Benjamin Zimmer

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Benjamin Zimmer is an American linguist and lexicographer. He is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He has previously served as editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

Contents 1 Career 2 Family 3 Notes 4 External links

[edit] Career

Zimmer graduated from Yale University in 1992 with a B.A. degree in linguistics,^[1] and went on to study linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago.^[2] For his research on the languages of Indonesia, he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation,^[3] the Fulbright Program,^[4] and the Social Science Research Council.^[5] He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles^[6] and taught at Kenyon College and Rutgers University.^[2]

In 2005, Zimmer was named a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and became a regular contributor to Language Log, a group weblog on language and linguistics.^[7] He was named editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press in 2006,^[8] and the following year launched "From A to Zimmer," a weekly lexicography column on the OUP blog.^[9]

In 2008, Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc.^[10][11] He edits the content of the online magazine of the Visual Thesaurus and writes a regular column on word origins entitled "Word Routes."^[12]

Zimmer's writing on language has appeared in two blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs (Vintage, 2008, ISBN 978-0307278067)^[13][14] and Far from the Madding Gerund (William, James, 2006, ISBN 978-1590280553).^[15][16] He has also written for Slate^{[17][18][19][20]} and The Boston Globe.^[21] His research on word origins is frequently cited by William Safire's "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine.^{[22][23][24][25][26]}

In 2008 Zimmer began a four-year term on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.^[27] He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.^[28]

[edit] Family

Benjamin is the brother of science writer Carl Zimmer and the son of former New Jersey congressman Dick Zimmer.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Contributor profile, Language Log
• From A to Zimmer, OUPblog, Oxford University Press
• Contributor profile, Visual Thesaurus