Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Wheeler, William Adolphus

WHEELER, William Adolphus, philologist, b. in Leicester, Mass., 14 Nov., 1833; d. in Roxbury, Mass., 28 Oct., 1874. He was graduated at Bowdoin in 1853, taught for several years, and, removing to Cambridge, Mass., assisted Dr. Joseph E. Worcester in the preparation of his Dictionary. For several years afterward he engaged in similar work, contributed to the quarto edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., 1864), and prepared for it an “Explanatory and Pronouncing Vocabulary of the Names of Noted Fictitious Persons and Places, including Familiar Pseudonyms, Surnames, etc.,” which was also issued separately (Boston, 1865). He became connected with the Boston public library in 1866, and afterward superintendent of the catalogue department. He was a careful and laborious student of Shakespeare, and made collections for a cyclopaedia of Shakespearian literature. Among his other works are revisions of the school editions of Webster's Dictionary, an abridgment of that work, and editions of the Rev. Charles Hole's “Brief Biographical Dictionary” (New York, 1866); “Mother Goose's Melodies,” with antiquarian and philological notes (1869); and a “Dickens Dictionary” (1873). He left in manuscript an index to anonymous literature entitled “Who Wrote It?”