Robert Hunter

Title Page: A New and Original Work of Reference to all the Words in the English Language, with a Full Account of Their Origin, Meaning, Pronunciation, and Use. With Numerous Illustrations

Robert Hunter (3 September 1823 – 25 February 1897) was the lead editor of the Encyclopædic Dictionary, which he produced in seven volumes between 1879 and 1888. In addition, he was an ordained minister and missionary for the Free Church of Scotland, and a notable geologist, becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society.

Life

Hunter was born in Newburgh, Fife in 1823 to John Mackenzie Hunter of Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, an excise officer,

He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School where he came first in the open exam for university bursaries and thus went to Marischal College at the University of Aberdeen. He studied Latin, Greek, Mathematics and Natural Science, frequently coming first in the exams. Around 1843 he studied Divinity for at least one year at New College, Edinburgh.

His first job was as a tutor in the Bermudas, spending his free time collecting corals; in 1845 he brought home the finest preserved specimens of brain coral that professor Sir Richard Owen had ever seen. He arrived in Nagpur early in 1847. Both men were keen geologists, and on their missionary travels they both recorded the local geology and fossils. Both of them wrote a number of geological papers, which were read in their absence at the Geological Society of London. On 23 February 1997, for the centenary of Hunter's death, Loughton Town Council placed a blue plaque on the house with the inscription "The Rev. Robert Hunter (1823-1897) Lexicographer and Naturalist lived here".

He died at the house in 1897.

The Encyclopædic Dictionary

Hunter's best-known work is his Encyclopædic Dictionary.