Scargill edited five dictionaries published by Gage between 1967 and 1972, including the Concise Dictionary of Canadianisms. As director of the Lexicographical Centre for Canadian English at the University of Victoria, linguistics professor Matthew Harry Scargill traces and discusses some distinctly Canadian words and terms with essays in A Short History of Canadian English. He was born in Yorkshire, England in 1916 and received his B.A. (1938) and Ph.D (1940) from University of Leeds. He arrived in Canada in 1948, teaching first at Univerity of Alberta, then at University of Calgary where he became Dean of Arts and Science (1962). He came to University of Victoria in 1964 was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1970.

BOOKS:

Three Icelandic Sagas (Princeton University Press, 1950)
Development of Principal Sounds of Indo-European (University of Toronto Press, 1952)
Looking at Language (Gage, 1966)
Modern Canadian English Usage (McClelland & Stewart, 1974)
A Short History of Canadian Usage (Sono Nis, 1977, 1977, 1981).

[BCBW 2004] "Linguistics"