Formerly a member of the Department of English and Comparitive Literature at Columbia University, he is the author and editor of various reference works on language, including the Oxford American Dictionary and Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, 2nd Edition. He is also the bestselling author of Amo, Amas, Amat and More (a book on Latin, I surmise), The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate, and its compainion volume The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.