William Archibald Spooner Biography

William Archibald Spooner (22 July 1844 – 29 August 1930) was a long-serving Oxford don, notable for absent-mindedness, and supposedly liable to mix up the syllables in a spoken phrase, with unintentionally comic effect. Such phrases became known as spoonerisms, and are often used humorously. Many spoonerisms have been invented and attributed to Spooner.