Robert Burchfield, who took the Oxford English Dictionary into the 20th century, has died at 81.

A New Zealander, he came to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1949. The librarian of his college, Magdalen, was CT Onions, who had finished the Oxford English Dictionary after the death of James Murray in 1915.

Mr Burchfield started as a research student in middle English, with JRR Tolkien as his supervisor.

He became a lecturer in English Language at Christ Church, and honorary secretary of the Early English Text Society. Then Mr Onions recommended Mr Burchfield to Oxford University Press, and in 1957, he was appointed editor of the supplement to the OED.

OUP said he would need seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, four volumes and 6,000 pages.

On top of this, he was also a fellow and tutor in English Language at St Peter's College, Oxford.

Mr Burchfield's main innovation for the OED was to include overseas English of all kinds and indecent words of all periods, as well as scientific and technical terms, jargon and slang.

He went to the High Court to support his lexicographer's inclusion of unfavourable senses of the word Jew, and received some anonymous death threats.

When he started in 1957, OUP had five dictionaries. By the time he retired there were more than 20. As supplement editor and, from 1971 to 1984, as chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, he built up a staff of 30.

Mr Burchfield, who lived in Sutton Courtenay, was president of the English Association, and became an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Institute of Linguists, and an honorary DLitt of Liverpool University and of his old New Zealand university, Victoria University of Wellington. He was appointed CBE in 1975.

After retirement from the Press in 1988, he became an emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College in 1990 and in 1995 he rewrote and updated Fowler's quirky Modern English Usage.