Sarah Ogilvie

Sarah Ogilvie is an Australian linguist, lexicographer, and computer scientist.

Early life Ogilvie grew up in Brisbane, Australia. As a graduate student, she spent a few years living with the Lamalama people, an aboriginal tribe on the tip of Cape York in northern Australia. While there, she wrote a dictionary and grammar of their language, Morrobalama, which had never been written down before.

Education She completed a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics at the University of Queensland and an MA in linguistics at the Australian National University. She completed her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Oxford.

Career She used to teach linguistics at Stanford, Cambridge, and Australian National University. She also worked at Amazon's innovation lab in Silicon Valley. Ogilvie is also a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

She currently works as a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics and of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford.

Publications

Concise Encyclopedia of the Languages of the World (Elsevier, 2008)

Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization (Cambridge University Press, 2014) The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2020) Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Gen Z, Explained: the art of living in a digital age (University of Chicago Press, 2022) The Dictionary People: the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus (UK), Knopf (USA), 2023)