Birth of Richard Chenevix Trench, Prelate, Philologist and Poet

Richard Chenevix Trench is born in Dublin on September 9, 1807. A distinguished Anglican prelate, poet, and philologist, Trench served as Archbishop of Dublin and was deeply engaged in both linguistic scholarship and theological writing. He played a crucial role in the development of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary — the idea for a comprehensive English lexicon was inspired by a paper he presented to the Philological Society in 1857. Trench emphasized the importance of tracing the historical evolution of words, laying the intellectual groundwork for what remains one of the most ambitious dictionary projects in the world.