Sarah Ogilvie

Ogilvie grew up in Brisbane, Australia. As a graduate student, she spent a few years living with the Lamalama people, an aboriginal tribe^[a] 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.^[1]

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.^[2] She completed her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Oxford.^[3]

She used to teach linguistics at Stanford, Cambridge, and Australian National University. She also worked at Amazon's innovation lab in Silicon Valley.^[3] While working at Amazon's Lab126, she was part of the team that developed the Kindle.^[4] Ogilvie is also a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.^[2]

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.^[2]

• Concise Encyclopedia of the Languages of the World (Elsevier, 2008)
• "Words of the World". Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Retrieved 2025-07-16.
• 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)