Angus McIntosh (linguist)

Angus Mcintosh, FRSE, FBA (10 January 1914 – 25 October 2005) was a British linguist and academic, specialising in historical linguistics.

McIntosh was born in 1914 near Sunderland, England, to Scottish parents. He was educated locally, at Ryhope Grammar School, and studied English at Oriel College, Oxford. He then studied comparative philology at Merton College, Oxford, and was a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard University. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, including working in intelligence at Bletchley Park.

Having taught at University College, Swansea, before the war, he moved to the University of Oxford after being demobbed. Only two years later, in 1948, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as its first Forbes Professor of English Language and General Linguistics. He remained at Edinburgh until retirement, and then served as director of the Middle English Dialect Atlas Project from 1979 to 1986. He was an honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow until his death in 2005.