Ben Zimmer

Benjamin Zimmer (born 1971)^[1] is an American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator. He is a contributing editor for The Atlantic . He was formerly a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal , The Boston Globe , and The New York Times Magazine , and the editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Zimmer was also an executive editor of Vocabulary.com and VisualThesaurus.com.^{[2] [3] [4]}

Benjamin Zimmer was the younger of two boys born to the Jewish American politician Dick Zimmer and his wife, Marfy Goodspeed. His brother, journalist Carl Zimmer, is also a science communicator.

Zimmer graduated from Yale University in 1992 with a BA in linguistics, and went on to study linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago.^[1] For his research on the languages of Indonesia, he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation,^[5] the Fulbright Program,^[6] and the Social Science Research Council.^[7]

Zimmer has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; Kenyon College; and Rutgers University.^[1]

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.^[8] He was named editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press in 2006,^[9] and the next year launched "From A to Zimmer", a weekly lexicography column on the Oxford University Press blog.^[10]

In 2008, Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc.^[11] He edits the online content of the Visual Thesaurus and its sister site Vocabulary.com, and writes a regular column on word origins, "Word Routes".^[1]

Zimmer's research on word origins was frequently cited by William Safire's "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine . On March 11, 2010, Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati announced Zimmer's appointment as the new "On Language" columnist, succeeding Safire, the founding and regular columnist until his death in late 2009.^[12] Zimmer's last "On Language" column was published on February 27, 2011. In it, Zimmer wrote that the column was "finally coming to a close" and that "it [was] time to bid adieu, after some 1,500 dispatches from the frontiers of language."

On December 18, 2011, The Boston Globe announced that Zimmer would be a regular language columnist for the newspaper's Sunday Ideas section.^[13] His Globe column continued until June 28, 2013, when he began a new weekly language column for The Wall Street Journal 's Saturday Review section, "Word on the Street".^[14]

Zimmer's writing on language has appeared in two blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs (Vintage, 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-27806-7)^{[15] [16]} and Far from the Madding Gerund (William, James, 2006, ISBN 978-1-59028-055-3).^{[17] [18]} He has also written for Slate ,^[19] The New York Times Book Review ,^[20] The New York Times Sunday Review,^[21] and The Atlantic .^[22]

Zimmer is the chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee and has served on the society's Executive Council.^[23] He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.^[24]

The Linguistic Society of America gave Zimmer its first ever Linguistics Journalism Award in 2014.^[25] In January 2017, Zimmer was one of the speakers in the LSA's inaugural Public Lectures on Language series.^[26]

Zimmer lives in Jersey City, New Jersey with his wife and a son.^[4] He is the brother of science writer Carl Zimmer and the son of former New Jersey congressman Dick Zimmer.^[27]

• Official website, including biography and archive of writings
• Contributor profile, Language Log
• From A to Zimmer, OUPblog, Oxford University Press
• Contributor profile, Visual Thesaurus