W. J. Watson

Professor William J. Watson (1865–1948) was a toponymist, one of the greatest Scottish scholars of the 20th century, and was the first scholar to place the study of Scottish place names on a firm linguistic basis. A native Gaelic-speaker, born in Easter Ross, he was educated at the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. He became a teacher in Glasgow, Inverness and then Edinburgh, going on to the chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1914, despite holding no prior university position. He remained in this prestigious position until making way for his son James Carmichael Watson in 1938. Watson is best known for his The Celtic Place-names of Scotland originally published in 1926. It is still the primary scholarly reference guide on the subject.