Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk

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Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA (born 1920) is a British linguist.

In the early 1960s, Randolph Quirk and colleagues, among them a young David Crystal, conducted an ambitious project now known as the Survey of English Usage. This was a compilation of a large body of English language data (a corpus), comprising around one million words as they were then used in everyday life. The project was to be the foundation of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik's A Comprehensive Grammar Of The English Language (Longman, 1985), a widely-used reference grammar used around the world. Instead of declaring what was correct grammatical usage, Quirk and his collaborators showed readers that certain percentages of English speakers preferred one usage to another.

He was president of the British Academy from 1985 to 1989 and became a life peer as Baron Quirk, of Bloomsbury in the London Borough of Camden in 1994.