John DeFrancis (Bridgeport, Connecticut, August 31, 1911 – Honolulu, Hawai’i, January 2, 2009) was a renowned teacher and linguist of Chinese. He was also a socially committed and politically active individual who was unusually adventurous and gregarious. DeFrancis’s father was a laborer and his mother was illiterate, the memory of which later spurred him to sympathize with Chinese workers and peasants who could not read and write.

DeFrancis’s career as a teacher and scholar of Chinese may be divided into four stages: student, teacher, researcher, and lexicogra…