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He was born on February 7, 1777 at Salem, Massachussets, United States, the eldest of the ten children of Timothy and Rebecca (White) Pickering, and the fifth in descent from John Pickering (1615 - 57), presumably a Yorkshireman, by trade a carpenter, who settled in Salem in 1637.
At the time of John's birth his father was colonel of a Massachusetts regiment quartered in New Jersey.
John entered Harvard College in 1792 and early gained a reputation for his devotion to the classics and, in lesser degree, to French. After his graduation in 1796, Pickering began the study of law in Philadelphia in the office of Edward Tilghman.
In July 1797 he embarked at New Castle, Delaware, for Lisbon to become secretary to William Smith of South Carolina, the American minister to Portugal. He spent two happy years in Portugal, with ample leisure to enjoy the social life of the capital and of Cintra, to study the Romance languages, Turkish, and Arabic, and to continue his reading of the law.
He went to London in 1799, where he was welcomed by Rufus King and, some months later, became his secretary. He spent much time in the law courts and in the House of Parliament, enjoyed the theatres, visited Paris, Brussels, and the Dutch cities, collected a remarkable library - part of which he was compelled to sell on his return to the United States - and made the acquaintance of various scholars.
In 1804 he was admitted to the Essex County bar. Pickering moved to Boston in 1827 and in 1829 was made city solicitor, an office that he held until a few months before his death. His political horizon lay somewhere in the western suburbs of Boston, but he represented Salem in the General Court in 1812, 1814, and 1826, was a member of the Governor's Council in 1818, was a senator from Suffolk County in 1829, and drafted Part First: Of the Internal Administration of the Government (1833) of the Revised Statutes of Massachusetts.
His two closest correspondents, on linguistic subjects, were Pierre Étienne Du Ponceau and Wilhelm von Humboldt; his greatest admiration. In collaboration with Daniel Appleton White he prepared the first American edition of Sallust (Salem, 1805), and he is still remembered as the author of the first published collection of Americanisms, real or fancied, his Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed To Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816).
Most of his articles and monographs on linguistic subjects are scattered through the volumes of the North American Review, the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
He died in Boston, after a year of declining health, and was buried in Salem.
The reputation of John Pickering as a lawyer was higher with his colleagues than with the public at large, but he was much sought after as a counselor, and his articles on legal subjects, most of them contributed to the American Jurist, are the work of a scholar. He was one of the few Americans deeply interested in Roman law. Besides, he was the leading authority of his time on the languages of the North American Indians. His chief service to his own time was his Comprehensive Lexicon of the Greek Language, which was the best Greek-English dictionary before Liddell and Scott.
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He acquired, with various degrees of thoroughness, all the principal European and Semitic languages, was acquainted with several of the Chinese group.
It was said of him, with pardonable exaggeration, that he spent his life in declining honors. Both for his personal qualities and his attainments he was one of the most highly regarded Bostonians of his day.
On March 3, 1805, he married Sarah White, who was his first cousin once removed through his father's family, and his second cousin through his mother's. His wife, with their two sons and a daughter, survived him.
To her wise management and self-effacing devotion he owed the leisure that enabled him to attain eminence both in the law and in philology.
