Norbert Schmitt is an American-born applied linguist based in the UK and the most prolific vocabulary researcher of his generation after Paul Nation. He spent his career at the University of Nottingham, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, having retired from the chair in September 2020. Schmitt began as an EFL teacher in Japan in 1988 and turned to vocabulary research during his PhD years at Nottingham (1994–1997).
Where Nation built the frequency-and-coverage tradition, Schmitt widened the field's scope. He pushed depth of word knowledge, formulaic language, and statistical modelling into the centre of second-language vocabulary research. His 2011 paper with Jiang and Grabe in the Modern Language Journal challenged the discrete-threshold framing of lexical coverage by showing comprehension as a graded function of vocabulary knowledge, not a step at 95 or 98 percent.