Whitney, William Dwight

William Dwight (1827-1894), an American student of languages. He was born at Northampton, Massachusetts. He was graduated at Williams College in 1845. He studied at the German universities of Berlin and Tubingen. In 1854 he became professor of Sanskrit at Yale. Professor Whitney was one of the first Americans to be recognized by the university doctors of Germany as a specialist--a scholar in their sense of the word. He wrote several high school texts, including grammars of the French, German, and English languages. His reputation rests on his work in Sanskrit. He published a Sanskrit grammar and contributed to a monumental Sanskrit dictionary published in Germany. He compiled also a German dictionary for college use and acted as editor-in-chief of the Century Dictionary of the English language. See Sanskrit; Dictionary; Yale