Friedrich Kluge is known for the Kluge etymological dictionary

Etymological dictionary

An etymological dictionary discusses the etymology of the words listed. Often, large dictionaries, such as the OED and Webster's, will contain some etymological information, without aspiring to focus on etymology....

 of the German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 (Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache), which was first published in 1883.

Kluge was born in Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, and died in Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the extreme south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg. Historically, the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain...

. He studied Comparative Linguistics and Classic and Modern Philologies at the universities of Leipzig

University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...

, Strasbourg

University of Strasbourg

The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....

 and Freiburg.

He was a professor of German at the universities of Jena and Freiburg.

A Proto Germanic sound law which he formulated in a paper from 1884 is nowadays known as Kluge's Law

Kluge's Law

Kluge's Law is a Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. It describes the assimilation of an n to a preceding voiced consonant, under the condition that the n was part of a suffix which was accented in Proto-Indo-European . This law explains the origin of the Proto Germanic...

.