Charles Talbut Onions
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Charles Talbut Onions (C.T. Onions) (1873-1965) was an English grammarian and lexicographer.
He joined James Murray on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary at Oxford in 1895 and in 1914 he began independent editorial work with his own assistants. His A Shakespeare Glossary was published in 1911. He co-edited the 1933 Supplement with William Craigie. Following the death of William Little in 1922, he assumed the editorship of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. His last work The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) was published posthumously and is generally considered to be the standard work on the subject.
Born in Edgbaston, in the West Midlands, he received his M.A. at the University of London and an honorary doctorate from Oxford. He was a fellow and librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford and a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. He was editor of the journal Medium Aevum from 1932 to 1956. He later lectured on pottery in the Ashmolean. Indeed, this was an interest he shared with Master James Forbes of St Benet's Hall on St Giles though it is uncertain whether the two ever met, Forbes taking his post the year before Onions died.
Onions famously promoted the devotion to the cult of the then Blessed Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows. So strong was his belief in this holy saint that it is said that in the volumes of the OED he edited a secret prayer to Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows appears, as well, it is believed, as several coded messages to British anti-Fascist organisations.
