Robert Beard

Robert Beard was born in Fayetteville, NC in February of 1938 and attended what was then Fayetteville High School, now Terry Sanford High School. On graduation, he enrolled in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and graduated in three years. From UNC, he went to the University of Michigan, where he completed his PhD in Slavic Linguistics in 1966.

By 1965 he had a job at Bucknell University, a small primarily undergraduate university in Lewisburg, PA, where he worked for 35 years, publishing three books and more than 50 professional articles. On his retirement in 2000, he and two partners founded yourDictionary.com, and he became CEO in 2003. In 2004 he and his partners parted and Beard formed Lexiteria, LLC with a website at alphaDictionary.com.

Beard's scholarly theory, Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology, has been included in several textbook on linguistic morphology. He received three Fulbright Fellowships over his career and has been written up in the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and several other notable newspapers around the world. He has appeared on NPR and written a guest column for the CNN blog.