20 Facts About David Crystal

1.

David Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has published works on the subject, including Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.

2.

David Crystal has been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation.

3.

Currently, David Crystal lives in Holyhead with his wife and is a practicing Roman Catholic.

4.

David Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had been evacuated there during The Blitz.

5.

David Crystal remained estranged from and ignorant of his father for most of his childhood, but later learnt of the life and career of Dr Samuel Crystal in London, and of his half-Jewish heritage.

6.

David Crystal grew up with his mother in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951.

7.

David Crystal's son Ben Crystal is an author, and has co-authored four books with his father.

8.

David Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962, and was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage.

9.

David Crystal was awarded the OBE in 1995 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000.

10.

David Crystal is a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

11.

David Crystal is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, honorary president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, and Patron of the UK National Literacy Association.

12.

David Crystal is a consultant for Babel - The Language Magazine, for which he has written articles.

13.

David Crystal has authored, co-authored, and edited over 120 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, and the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, the Cambridge Encyclopedia, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia.

14.

David Crystal has published several books for the general reader about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner.

15.

David Crystal's book Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling explains why some English words are difficult to spell.

16.

David Crystal is a proponent of a new field of study, Internet linguistics, and has published Language and the Internet on the subject.

17.

David Crystal was one of the book series editors of The Language Library.

18.

From 2001 to 2006, David Crystal served as the Chairman of David Crystal Reference Systems Limited, a provider of reference content and Internet search and advertising technology.

19.

The company's iSense and Sitescreen products are based upon the patented Global Data Model, a complex semantic network that David Crystal devised in the early 1980s and was adapted for use on the Internet in the mid 1990s.

20.

David Crystal was influential in a campaign to save Holyhead's convent from demolition, leading to the creation of the Ucheldre Centre.