Eric Honeywood Partridge, 1894-1979, was an etymologist. He was born February 6, 1894, in Poverty Bay, New Zealand, son of John Thomas (a farmer) and Ethel Annabella (Norris) Partridge. In 1907, the family moved to Brisbane, Australia where Partridge graduated from the University of Queensland in 1921, after studying Classics, French and English. He received his B.Litt. (with first class honors) from Oxford University in 1923. Serving in the Australian infantry during World War I, he lived through the horror of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. In 1925, Partridge married Agnes Dora Vye–Parmenter with whom he had one daughter, Rosemary Ethel Honeywood Mann. After teaching for two years as a university lecturer in Manchester and London, Partridge gave up a promising academic career to found the small London publishing house, Scholartis. The press was moderately successful until the Great Depression, when he was forced to take on work as a free–lance writer. He often commented that the Depression allowed him to discover his real love and talent for writing books. Partridge wrote over forty books on the English language, including well–known works on etymology, slang, jargon, and clichés. He died on June 1, 1979 in Devon, England.

Norris Maris Davidson, 1906-1975, was the music annotator for the CBS broadcast of the Philadelphia Orchestra for twenty years and resided at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He and Partridge corresponded about the meaning and origins of words, books and their authors, and about matters of health in the later years. The two men met on one occasion in London in August of 1964. The letters of Davidson to Partridge from 1961 to 1975 may be found in the Partridge mss. At the time of his death, Davidson was a resident of the Foulkeways Community in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania.