In 1856 he published a valuable essay on Calderón, with a translation of a portion of Life is a Dream in the original metre. His advocacy of a revised translation of the New Testament (1858) helped promote another great national project. As one of the three founders of the dictionary, he expressed his vision thus: it would be 'an entirely new Dictionary no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout'. Trench envisaged a totally new dictionary that was a 'lexicon totius Anglicitatis'. Another great service to English philology was rendered by his paper, read before the Philological Society, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857), which gave the first impulse to the great Oxford English Dictionary. All have gone through numerous editions and have contributed much to promote the historical study of the English tongue. It was followed by two little volumes of similar character- English Past and Present (1855) and A Select Glossary of English Words (1859). His stated purpose was to demonstrate that in words, even taken singly, "there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up"-an argument which he supported by a number of apposite illustrations. In 1851 he established his fame as a philologist by The Study of Words, originally delivered as lectures to the pupils of the Diocesan Training School, Winchester. Trench joined the Canterbury Association on 27 March 1848, on the same day as Samuel Wilberforce and Wilberforce's brother Robert. He was shortly afterwards appointed to a theological chair at King's College London.
In 18 he preached the Hulsean lecture, and in the former year was made examining chaplain to Wilberforce, now Bishop of Oxford. In 1841 he resigned his living to become curate to Samuel Wilberforce, then rector of Alverstoke, and upon Wilberforce's promotion to the deanery of Westminster Abbey in 1845 he was presented to the rectory of Itchenstoke. These volumes revealed the author as the most gifted of the immediate disciples of Wordsworth, with a warmer colouring and more pronounced ecclesiastical sympathies than the master, and strong affinities to Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keble and Richard Monckton Milnes. While incumbent of Curdridge Chapel near Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire, he published (1835) The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems, which was favourably received, and was followed in 1838 by Sabbation, Honor Neale, and other Poems, and in 1842 by Poems from Eastern Sources. He went to school at Harrow, and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829.
His elder brother was Francis Chenevix Trench. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Richard Trench (1774–1860), barrister-at-law, and the Dublin writer Melesina Chenevix (1768–1827). Richard Chenevix Trench (Richard Trench until 1873 9 September 1807 – 28 March 1886) was an Anglican archbishop and poet.
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