Frederick William Thomas was born in Staffordshire in 1867. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1885, graduating with a first class degree in both classics and Indian languages and being awarded a Browne medal in both 1888 and 1889. Thomas was a librarian at the India Office Library (now subsumed into the British Library) between 1898 and 1927. Simultaneously he was lecturer in comparative philology at University College, London, from 1908 to 1935, Reader in Tibetan at London University from 1909 to 1937, and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University between 1927 and 1937, in which capacity he became a fellow of Balliol College. He studied and catalogued many Tibetan texts. Thomas died on 6 May 1956.