Richard Lederer

Richard Lederer (born May 26, 1938) is an American author, speaker, and teacher. He is best known for his books on the English language and on word play such as puns, oxymorons, and anagrams. He refers to himself as "the Wizard of Idiom," "Attila the Pun," and "Conan the Grammarian." His weekly column, "Looking at Language", is syndicated in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.

Lederer invented the words aptagram, an anagram which means the same as the other word, and the antigram, an anagram which means the opposite.

Lederer was the youngest of five children born to a Jewish mother from Poland and a Jewish father from Bavaria. He was raised in West Philadelphia. He graduated from Haverford College as a pre-med student. He attended Harvard Law School for one year, then switched to the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Harvard University. He taught English and media at the St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire for 27 years until 1989, where he served as the first Jewish head of a department. He later earned a PhD in Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire.

He has written more than 30 books, including Anguished English (1987), Get Thee to a Punnery (1988), Crazy English (1989),A Man of My Words (2003), The Word Circus (1998), The Miracle of Language (1992), The Cunning Linguist (2001), Word Wizard (2006), and Presidential Trivia (2007). Known as a "verbivore", a word he coined in the early 1980s, Lederer's interests include uncovering word origins, pointing out common grammatical errors and fallacies, and exploring palindromes, anagrams, and other forms of recreational wordplay. Lederer wrote the foreword to Words at Play: Quips, Quirks and Oddities, by O.V. Michaelsen (Sterling Publishing Company, New York, 1998), and to Weather Facts and Fun (2009), a children's book on weather, co-written by Josh Judge and Kathe Cussen and published by SciArt Media. He was elected International Punster of the Year in 1989 and was the 2002 recipient of the Golden Gavel of Toastmasters International.

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