11 Facts About Ben Zimmer

Benjamin Zimmer was born on 1971 and is an American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator.

Ben Zimmer 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.

Ben Zimmer taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; Kenyon College; and Rutgers University.

In 2005, Ben 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.

Ben Zimmer was named editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press in 2006, and the next year launched "From A to Zimmer", a weekly lexicography column on the Oxford University Press blog.

In 2008, Ben Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc He edits the online content of the Visual Thesaurus and its sister site Vocabulary.

On December 18,2011, The Boston Globe announced that Ben Zimmer would be a regular language columnist for the newspaper's Sunday Ideas section.

Ben Zimmer has written for Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Sunday Review, and The Atlantic.

Ben Zimmer is the chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee and has served on the society's Executive Council.

Ben Zimmer is a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.

In January 2017, Ben Zimmer was one of the speakers in the LSA's inaugural Public Lectures on Language series.