Strachan, John (1862–1907), philologist and celticist, was born 31 January 1862 in Keith, Banffshire, Scotland, son of James Strachan, owner of Brae farm, and Ann Strachan (née Kerr). He was educated at Keith grammar school and entered King's College, Aberdeen, in 1877 at the age of 15, to study classics and philosophy. He spent the summer of 1880 at Göttingen under Professor Benfey. Graduating from Aberdeen with first-class honours in 1881, he won several prizes and the Ferguson scholarship in classics to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied under Robert Neil. He subsequently won a Polson scholarship at Cambridge, and took the first part of the classical tripos with the highest distinction in 1883. He attended summer courses in the Scottish Highlands, in Wales, and in Ireland to learn Celtic languages, and also attended at Jena to study Sanskrit under Delbrück and Celtic under Rudolf Thurneysen (qv). After graduating from Cambridge in 1885 with special distinction in classics and comparative philology, he was made professor of Greek at Owens College, Manchester, in 1885. In 1889 he added comparative philology to his teaching duties, and began courses in Celtic studies.
One of his first publications was a schools edition of Herodotus, book vi, with an exemplary introduction on the Ionic dialect. He was appointed some years later to a newly founded but unpaid lectureship in Celtic, so that toward the end of his life he had to contend with the burden of having to teach Greek and Celtic as well as Sanskrit and comparative philology at Manchester. In order to pursue his private researches in Celtic studies he had to forego the pleasure of a holiday for most of his short working life. His free time from teaching was thus entirely given over to research. He continued his private researches in Greek grammar and philology until his death, but published nothing more in them. The rest of his scholarly life was spent in the field of Celtic studies. His greatest single publication in Celtic studies was an edition of the entire corpus of Old Irish glosses, compiled from manuscripts scattered throughout Europe, undertaken in collaboration with Whitley Stokes – the two volumes of the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (1901, 1903). He had compiled materials for a glossary to this, which, however, remained unpublished at his death. Aberdeen University conferred an honorary LLD on him in 1900.
In 1903 he opened the School of Irish Learning at Dublin, together with Kuno Meyer (qv), with courses in Old and Middle Irish. It was Strachan who first suggested the title Ériu for the journal of Irish philology and literature which the two men co-founded. The school subsequently became instrumental in laying the foundations for Celtic studies in Ireland. His Selections from the Old-Irish glosses (1904) and Old-Irish paradigms (1905), which he compiled for the benefit of his students, still remain standard textbooks in the subject. In 1908 he published Stories from the Táin. His ground-breaking papers on Celtic philology and grammar were mainly published in the Philological Society Transactions. His Introduction to Early Welsh was published posthumously by Manchester University Press. He became ill in September 1907 at Peniarth, when on a visit to collate the texts of some early Welsh manuscripts and died 25 September 1907 at Hilton Park, Prestwich, probably of tuberculosis.
He married (1886) Mina, daughter of his schoolmaster Dr James Grant, from Keith grammar school; they had eight children.