Lilye, or LILY, WILLIAM, classical grammarian, was born at Odiham, in Hampshire, about 1466, and graduated at Oxford, being elected demy of Magdalen in 1486. Having taken his B.A. degree, he travelled to the East; and at Rhodes, then the home of the Knights Hospitalers, he learned Greek from refugees from Constantinople. He afterwards spent some time studying Greek and Latin in Rome and Venice, and returned home about 1509. After teaching for a while privately in London he was appointed (1512) by Dean Colet the first head-master of the new St Paul's school; this post he held till he was carried off by the plague towards the end of 1522. Lilye, who has good claims to be considered the first who taught Greek in London, had a hand in Colet's Brevissima Institutio, which, as corrected by Lilye's friend Erasmus, and redacted by Lilye himself, was known as the Etōn Latin Grammar. Lilye's share embraced the lines on the genders of nouns, beginning 'Propria quæ maribus,' and those on the conjugation of verbs, 'As in præsenti,' if no more. Besides this he wrote Latin poems, printed along with those of another great friend, Sir Thomas More, at Basel in 1518, and a volume of Latin verse against a rival school-master, entitled Antibossicon ad Gulielmum Hormannum (1521).