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Robert William Burchfield CNZM CBE (27 January 1923 – 5 July 2004)was a scholar, writer, and lexicographer.

Born in Wanganui, New Zealand, he studied at Wanganui Technical College and Victoria University in Wellington. After war service in the Royal New Zealand Artillery, he graduated MA from Wellington in 1948 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford University in England, where his preparation of an edition of the Ormulum was supervised by J.R.R. Tolkien. C. T. Onions, then Magdalen librarian, recommended him to Dan Devin as editor of the secondSupplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: Burchfield worked on the Supplement from 1957 to 1986. Subsequently he produceda controversial, substantially rewritten and less prescriptivist, edition ofModern English Usage, the famous style guide.

He died at the age of 81.

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