Born in
Whanganui,
New Zealand, he studied at
Wanganui Technical College and
Victoria University in
Wellington. After war service in the
Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery, he graduated MA from Wellington in 1948 and won a
Rhodes Scholarship to
Magdalen College,
Oxford University, in England, where he was tutored by
C. S. Lewis. He became a Fellow of Magdalen and lecturer in English straight after graduating (1952–53), subsequently moving colleges to
Christ Church (1953–57) and
St Peter's (1955–79). Through
C. T. Onions, the Magdalen librarian, Burchfield assisted in editing one of Onions's projects, the
Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. His preparation of an edition of the
Ormulum was supervised by
J. R. R. Tolkien. Onions recommended him to
Dan Davin as editor of the second
Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, on which he worked from 1957 to 1986. He re-established the network of volunteer readers sending in records of words that had helped to create the original OED but had been allowed to fall away. Four years later the full nature of his treatment of foreign words was shown: he deleted 17 per cent of the foreign
loan words and words from regional forms of English; and his coverage was not as extensive as his predecessors, especially Onions, who included 45 per cent more loanwords and
World Englishes. In 2012, a book documented Burchfield's work and showed that many of the omitted words had
only a single recorded usage, but their removal ran against both what was thought to be the established OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English". The author of the book concerned,
Sarah Ogilvie, complained that people were unfairly judging Burchfield and that her coverage had been misleadingly reported in the media. Burchfield also participated in a 1980s
BBC committee that monitored compliance with the broadcaster's policy of using
received pronunciation in newscasting, before that policy was abandoned in 1989 in favor of "using announcers and newsreaders with a more representative range of accents." In 1994 the
Hamburg-based
Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Burchfield its annual
Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his life's work. In retirement, he produced a controversial new edition, substantially rewritten and less
prescriptivist, of ''
Fowler's Modern English Usage'', the long-established
style guide by
Henry Watson Fowler. He lived for many years in
Sutton Courtenay, previously in
Berkshire, now in
Oxfordshire. He died in
Abingdon-on-Thames at 81, in 2004. He married twice and had three children. ==Selected works==