W.C. Watt, UC Irvine cognitive sciences professor emeritus, passed away on Nov. 19, 2025 at the age of 93.

A linguist by training, Watt pursued research on cognitive semiotics - the various symbols, including language, that we use to create meaning. He published numerous book chapters and works in journals including Semiotica, the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and the American Journal of Semiotics. His work spanned systems as varied as language, writing, psycholinguistics, and even the symbolic structures encoded in cattle brands. One piece in particular for which he’s most widely known, published in 1987 in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, presented a new theory tracing back to 1500 B.C. on how alphabetical order started. Featured in the Los Angeles Times, Watt’s theory explained that letters were arranged in a matrix according to their sounds and where the sounds are made in the mouth. Like-sounding letters were separated so that children learning the alphabet would not be confused by similar sounds, and reading the columns from left to right produced a recitation of the alphabet.

“Watt had an absolutely beautiful mind,” says Willam R. Schonfeld, emeritus professor and former dean of the School of Social Sciences. “He was about as smart as a human being gets to be. From the scope of his knowledge on topics from film to Romanesque churches in Catalonia, to the elegance of the way he thought about things and put them together, he sparkled. Watt had an inordinate array of interests and a spectacular ability to connect and relate everything. Coupled with his great sense of humor, he was the dream colleague you’d want in any academic community to which you belonged. And I was fortunate to work alongside him for many, many years and to have him as a dear friend.”

Watt’s work reflected that breadth as he also pursued topics in architecture, generative homiletics and, a particular favorite among students, the formal study of film, including a “Sociology of Horror Film” course he co-taught in the early 70s. Students lucky enough to land a spot in what one 50^th anniversary blogger called “the king UCI class of all time” screened classics including “Curse of the Demon,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Wolfman,” “The Cat People,” “Blacula,” and others, watching for the sociological mechanisms and tropes that caused audiences to respond.

Some of these sessions were intentionally held at late hours – 8:00-11:00 p.m. and midnight to 3 a.m. – ensuring that students’ treks to their dorms following the horror films took place in the darkest hours, which only added to the course’s legend.

Watt earned his undergraduate degree in comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was also active in the Navy ROTC program with plans to become a pilot. He served on the USS Wisconsin, which took him to Portugal for the first time and gave him a lifelong love of the ocean, according to his daughter, Kate. “He also served in the Army after college, evading Advanced Infantry by bluffing his way onto the staff of the base commander, lying about newspaper experience and 100 WPM typing skills,” she says. He was later posted at the Pentagon, as a Private First Class.

After his Honorable Discharge in 1956, Watt got his masters in linguistics at Georgetown (1959) and then worked in Washington DC at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), where he worked in computational linguistics (back when computers were programmed with punchcards, according to his daughter) and wrote papers on "A Prerequisite to the Utility of Microgrammars," "Iconic Grammar," "Placebo IV: Rules, Concordance, Sample Computer Generation," and "Acceptance, Acceptability, Grammaticality, Sentencehood," and other topics. All of this he did while working on his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania (1967) under the mentorship of Paul Garvin and Henry Hiz, and fathering four children (1956-1965). He focused on comparative linguistics in his early research before carving his own pathway in the new field of linguistics. He spent a summer fellowship at MIT before accepting a faculty role at Carnegie Mellon University from 1967-70 where he taught computational linguistics - a subject, according to his daughter, Watt said he knew nothing about - under the supervision of Allen Newell, Alan Perlis, and Herb Simon. He was recruited to Irvine by A. Kimball Romney – who would later teach Watt to sail – and Watt jumped at the chance to come to UCI which was, at the time, “mainly dirt trails and horses,” explains Kate.

“It felt like the wild west here,” she says. “Coming from an environment that had required a jacket and tie, he was quick to note the change in dress, and he promptly threw out his professional wear, choosing instead to dress exclusively from the Sears Workmen Collection, and later Dockers, with only open-toed shoes or sandals. He had a pair of red socks he saved for meetings with the dean as a show of respect.

“He could say and teach what he wanted and lead students in different directions to really explore a field that was just beginning to become one. And he loved it.”

Watt retired from UCI in 1991 when he was 62, but he continued running the school's contributions to the Campus-wide Honors Program, speaking at conferences and publishing work long after. In total, he published roughly 100 journal articles, most as sole author, including a nine-paper series on the proper characterization of the alphabet that he began in 1970. The final installment, opening with the line, “What follows is the final summation and extension of a series of ‘proper characterization’ papers that began publication fifty years ago,” was under review at the time of his death.

Watt was preceded in death by his son Andrew Sylvanus Watt (2014). He is survived by daughters Djuna Catherine Watt and Catherine Carnell Watt and son Gavin Thayer Watt; multiple grandchildren, step-grandchildren, and like-grandchildren including Andrew Watt-Barrera, Franck Dissard, Arianna Watt, Annaliesa Watt, David Watt, Steven Watt, and Gilbert Wieder; and he is remembered fondly by his extended family of friends and colleagues at UCI and beyond.

A memorial service is planned for Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 1:00-2:00 p.m. in Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1517.