An American lexicographer obsessed with the intricate delights of the English language, Eugene Ehrlich wrote dozens of dictionaries, thesauruses and other linguistic guides that aimed to edify and entertain the “extraordinarily literate”.

His works offer a rich and satisfying diet of abstruse terms and phrases — and he was frank enough to admit that, besides a passion for clarity and precision in expression, he liked sesquipedalian (long) words because they could impress and intimidate. Or, as you might say after reading his books, he was sempiternally operose on monuments of esoteric etymological erudition which could serve both to entertainingly enlighten and to aggressively obnubilate.

In his Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate (1994), and a dictionary of the same designation (1997), he offered a bountiful harvest of unusual words such as: “absquatulate” (to flee or abscond), “piacular” (sinful or wicked), “pinguid” (fatty, oily, greasy), “nescience” (ignorance) and “sapid” (pleasing to the taste).

In What’s in a Name (1999), he traced common words back to their origins in proper names. Some, such as the Earl of Sandwich, or Melvil Dewey, of the decimal system, are familiar. Others, such as R. J. L. Guppy, a Trinidadian clergyman who sent the first samples of the fish back to Britain, or Jules Léotard, a distinctively attired 19th-century French acrobat, are less so. Some seem rather unfair: “Dunce”, Ehrlich tells us, derives from John Duns Scotus, the 13th-century Franciscan philosopher whose name became a byword for all that the Renaissance hated about scholasticism.

Ehrlich was also keen to help people show off in other languages. In Les Bons Mots, or How to Amaze Tout le Monde with Everyday French (1997), he offered a handy guide to everyday phrases, such as the shoulder-shrugging “bon an, mal an”. He was most proud of his Latin phrasebooks, Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin (1995) and Amo, Amas, Amat, and More: How to use Latin to your own advantage and to the astonishment of others (1985). William F. Buckley wrote an introduction to the latter work, praising it as a “resourceful, voluminous and appetising smorgasbord”. Ehrlich freely admitted that the goal of Latin-dropping was “to decorate, to show one is pretty smart, pretty well educated”. He added: “I slip into Latin and French sometimes without being able to help myself — and yes, it can be pompous.”

Eugene Harold Ehrlich was born in Brooklyn in 1922, into an immigrant family that spoke Russian, Polish and Yiddish. He grew up near his parents’ stationery shop in Manhattan and studied languages at the City College of New York. “I had a terrible accent,” he once said. “When I went to college I was told I’d never get a job as a teacher if I didn’t speak better.”

During the war he served in the US Army, interrogating Japanese prisoners, and afterwards he did graduate work at the Columbia University Teachers’ College. He taught at Farleigh-Dickinson University and for many years worked as a consultant to technical and defence firms, making their presentations and reports as clear as possible.

He combined this with teaching part-time at Columbia, the work about which he was most passionate, teaching mature students to read and write to academic standard. His first books included a primer on technical writing and several grammar and writing guides.

He was one of the principal compilers of the Oxford American Dictionary (1980), the OED’s 70,000-entry guide to the distinctive language of the US, complete with neologisms such as “chairperson”. He wrote a dictionary of foreign phrases (1987) and a compendium of English words of foreign origin — from dungaree to pickelhaube — entitled You’ve Got Ketchup on Your Muumuu (2000).

In all his works, Ehrlich was determined to preserve subtle shades of meaning against “the forces of linguistic darkness”. He distinguished carefully between “childish” in the sense of “puerile”, and the less insulting “childlike”, meaning guileless or innocent. He insisted that “fulsome” was not “glowing”, but “cloying” and that “fortuitous” meant not “lucky” but “accidental”.

Reviewers, inevitably, delighted in pedantically pointing out his own acceptance of shifting meanings, like “transpire” (originally, to leak out or become public), or hopefully (originally “full of hope”, not “it is to be hoped”).

Other books included a weighty guide to the literary sites of the US, a lexicon of phrases from the King James Bible, and a compilation of American quotations. In this later work Ralph Waldo Emerson is found declaring: “We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.” Ehrlich’s voluminous labours helped to make sure that the American monument stayed in fine repair.

He is survived by Norma, his wife of 60 years, a daughter and three sons, one of whom, Richard, writes for The Times Magazine.

Eugene Ehrlich, scholar, lexicographer and teacher, was born on May 21, 1922. He died on April 5, 2008, aged 85