Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien!

Yup, it's his birthday today. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) would be 119 years old today! The author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy was also a philologist (the study of literary texts and of written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning) who taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature at Oxford for 24 years. He also worked on the New English Dictionary, which eventually became the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1918 to 1920. His main focus was on words beginning with w...such as wavy, whisking through willfulness. He was specifically involved in researching the words wag, walrus, wampum, warm, wasp, water, wick, and winter.