David Crystal works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1941, he spent his early years in Holyhead. His family moved to Liverpool in 1951, and he received his secondary schooling at St Mary's College. He read English at University College London (1959-62), specialised in English language studies, did some research there at the Survey of English Usage under Randolph Quirk (1962-3), then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, then at Reading. He published the first of his 100 or so books in 1964, and became known chiefly for his research work in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He held a chair at the University of Reading for 10 years, and is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. These days he divides his time between work on language and work on general reference publishing.

David Crystal's authored works are mainly in the field of language, including several Penguin books, but he is perhaps best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. His most recent authored books are Language Death (2000), on the world’s endangered languages, Words on Words (2000, a dictionary of language quotations compiled with his wife and business-partner, Hilary - Wheatley Medal, 2001), Language and the Internet (2001), and Shakespeare's Words (2002, in collaboration with his actor son, Ben). Other Shakespeare work includes a quarterly article for Around the Globe and regular articles for the Times Education Supplement. His next book, The Stories of English, a history of English from a sociolinguistic perspective, appears in January 2004.

His books on English phonetics and phonology include Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English and The English Tone of Voice. His clinical books include Introduction to Language Pathology, Profiling Linguistic Disability, Clinical Linguistics, and Linguistic Encounters with Language Handicap. His work for schools includes the Skylarks, Databank, and Datasearch programmes, Nineties Knowledge, Language A to Z, and Discover Grammar. His creative writing includes some volumes of devotional poetry; a biography of the Bon Sauveur foundation in Wales, Convent; and a play, Living On, also on the endangered languages theme; and he is currently editing the poetry of the African missionary John Bradburne, two books of which have been published. Performances include a dramatic reading of the St John Gospel, now available on CD.

He was founder-editor of the Journal of Child Language, Child Language Teaching and Therapy, and Linguistics Abstracts, and has edited several book series, such as Penguin Linguistics and Blackwell's Language Library. In the 1980s, David Crystal became general editor of several general encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, along with their various abridged editions. In 1996 the database supporting these books came under the ownership of AND International Publishers, who began to develop the database for electronic media. As part of his consultancy work with this company, he devised a knowledge management system (Global Data Model, or GDM) which allows the database to be searched in a highly sophisticated way (patent pending). In 2001, both the database and the GDM became the property of a new company, Crystal Reference, whose primary aim is the provision of reference data. Ongoing projects using the GDM include various applications for Internet searching and automatic document classification. Products of the new regime include The Penguin New Encyclopedia (2002), The Penguin Factfinder (2003), and The Penguin Concise Encyclopedia (2003).

David Crystal has been a consultant, contributor, or presenter on several radio and television programmes and series. These include The Story of English (BBC TV, 8 x 1 hour series 1986, consultant), The Story of English (radio version, 18 x 30-min series, BBC World Service, 1987, writer and presenter), several series on English for BBC Radio 4, Radio 5, and BBC Wales during the 1980s and 1990s (as writer and presenter), and The Routes of English (as consultant and contributor). Other television work includes Back to Babel (Infonation & Discovery Channel, 4 x 1-hour series, 2000, as consultant and continuity contributor), Blimey (BBC Knowledge, 3 x 1-hour series, 2001, as continuity contributor), The Routes of Welsh (BBC1, 6 x 30-min series, 2002, as consultant and contributor), and several programmes for Open University television, beginning with Grammar Rules (1980, as writer and presenter).

David Crystal is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL). He is president of the UK National Literacy Association, and past honorary president of the National Association for Professionals concerned with Language-Impaired Children, the International Association of Forensic Phonetics, and the Society of Indexers. He has also been a member of the Board of the British Council and is currently on the board of the English-Speaking Union. He received an OBE for services to the English language in 1995, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2000. He now lives in Holyhead, where he is the director of the Ucheldre Centre, a multi-purpose arts and exhibition centre. He is married with five children.

For a full list of David Crystal's publications, see the Crystal Reference site at www.crystalreference.com.