Turrell V. Wylie

Terry Wylie
Wylie circa 1950
Born	Ellwyn Turrell Wylie August 20, 1927 Durango, Colorado, United States
Died	August 25, 1984 (aged 57) Seattle, Washington, United States
Nationality	American
Education	University of Washington (B.A., Ph.D.)

Turrell Verl "Terry" Wylie (August 20, 1927 – August 25, 1984) was an American scholar, Tibetologist, sinologist, and professor, known as one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Tibet. He was for many years professor of Tibetan Studies at the University of Washington and its first chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. Wylie founded the Tibetan Studies program at the University of Washington, the first such program in the United States. His romanization system for rendering the Tibetan language, known as Wylie transliteration, is the main system used for transcribing Tibetan in academic and historical contexts.

He was born in Durango, Colorado on August 20, 1927 as Ellwyn Turrell Wylie.

He attended the University of Washington as an undergraduate student, where he graduated with a B.A. degree. Wylie then continued on at Washington as a graduate student, receiving a Ph.D. in Chinese in 1958 with a dissertation entitled "The Geography of Tibet According to the 'Dzam-gling-rgyas-bshad".

In 1960, following the People's Liberation Army takeover of Tibet, Wylie invited Sakya Dagchen Rinpoche, one of the main hierarchs of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, along with his family and his tutor, the Tibetan lama and scholar, and wife's uncle Dezhung Rinpoche, to Seattle where they settled.

Amongst students of Tibetan, Wylie is best known for the system of Tibetan transliteration described in his article A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription (1959). This has subsequently become the almost universally adopted scheme for accurately representing the orthography of Tibetan in the Latin script, and is commonly known as Wylie transliteration.

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