 He worked on the "Oxford English Dictionary" from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including "walrus", over which he struggled mightily.In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty.He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh.