Eric Honeywood Partridge was a lexicographer of the English language. Born in Waimata Valley, New Zealand, Partridge and his family later moved to Australia where he studied at the University of Queensland. After his time serving in the First World War he returned to university obtaining his BA and later becoming the Queensland Traveling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, working on an MA and a B.Litt. He later taught at the University of Manchester and the University of London and spent fifty years researching at the British Library for his over forty books on the history of slang and the English language. Partridge died in 1979.