Charles Harrington Elster

Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile—a lover of words.

He is the author and narrator of the audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage and the book by the same name. His other books include Tooth and Nail and Test of Time, vocabulary-building novels for high school students preparing to take the college entrance exams; There's a Word for It, a lighthearted look at unusual—and unusually useful—words; and The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, which William Safire of The New York Times hailed as "the best survey of the spoken field in years." In 2005 Harcourt published What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions About Language, and in 2006 Houghton Mifflin released the second edition of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, featuring nearly 200 new entries.

Charlie was pronunciation editor of the seventh and eighth editions of Black's Law Dictionary and a consultant for Garner's Modern American Usage. He is a guest contributor to the "On Language" column of The New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and other publications.

Charlie has also been talking about language on the radio since 1985. He has been interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered and been a guest on hundreds of radio shows around the country. For five and a half years he cohosted a weekly public radio talk show on language called A Way with Words.

Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his B.A. cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.