William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American educator, writer and lexicographer, graduated in the University of Edinburgh in 1891 and became a PhD in Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College between 1917 and 1939.

William Allen White was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement. Between 1896 and his death, White became a spokesman for middle America.

William Allingham was an Irish poet, diarist and editor. He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem "The Faeries" was much anthologised. But he is better known for his posthumously published Diary, in which he records his lively encounters with Tennyson, Carlyle and other writers and artists. His wife, Helen Allingham, was a well-known watercolourist and illustrator.

William Amasa Scott was an American economist and one of the leading representatives of the marginalist school.

William Andrew Chatto (1799–1864) was an English writer. He used the pseudonym Stephen Oliver (Junior).

William Arthur Shaw (1865–1943) was an English historian and archivist.

William Augustus Miles was an English political writer. He was also a British agent in the years around the French Revolution.

William Bennett Munro was a Canadian historian and political scientist. He taught at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. He was known for research on the seigneurial system in New France and on municipal administration in the United States.

William Barnes was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a comprehensive English grammar quoting from more than 70 different languages. A linguistic purist, Barnes strongly advocated against borrowing foreign words into English, and instead supported the use and proliferation of "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech".

William Barry Lord was a British author.