In Enemies of Promise (1938), the critic and essayist Cyril Connolly notes that he is setting out to write a book that will last ten years. Not an easy thing to do, and Enemies of Promise didn’t do it. Whenever I receive a small royalty check—or peasantry check, as I think of them—for a book I published more than a decade ago, I’m especially pleased. Imagine, then, what I might feel in 2026 if I were H.W. Fowler, whose A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a compendium of inexact words and troubling rules, is now a century old and still not merely readable but immensely useful to those among us who wish to be discerning in their use of the English language.

Little in the early career of Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) suggested that he would one day write a book for the ages, or that he would come to be known, as a biography of him by Jenny McMorris has it, as The Warden of English (2001). At Balliol College, Oxford, Fowler finished with second-class honors and failed to pass his divinity exam. His public school teaching days were short-circuited by his atheism. A stab at journalism didn’t work well either. Only after all this did he find his true métier, that of lexicographer. He discovered this when working with his brother, Francis George Fowler, on The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English