William Archibald Spooner died in Oxford on 29 August 1930. He had spent more than 60 years at New College, eventually becoming its Warden; however, his surname survived for a different reason.

Spooner entered New College as an undergraduate in 1862. After taking a First in Classics, he became a Fellow and went on to serve as lecturer, tutor and dean. He was an Anglican priest and became Warden of New College in 1903.

During his years at Oxford, Spooner acquired a reputation for accidentally exchanging sounds between words. Such a mistake might turn ‘rate of wages’ into ‘weight of rages’. People came to call these transpositions ‘spoonerisms’.

The reputation soon developed beyond Spooner’s own mistakes. Students began inventing increasingly elaborate examples and attributing them to him. Many of the lines still repeated as Spoonerisms, including some of the funniest, cannot reliably be shown to have been said by Spooner.

He did not enjoy the attention. When students called on him to make a speech on one occasion, he reportedly told them that they did not want a speech, but only wanted him to ‘say one of those things’.

The comic reputation also obscured a substantial academic career. Spooner supported extending Oxford’s syllabus into science, served as chairman of the council of Lady Margaret Hall and was involved with charitable organisations. After the First World War, he supported including three German former students alongside the other New College war dead.

Spooner retired as Warden in 1924. By the time he died six years later, ‘spoonerism’ had already become part of the language.