Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities. Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.

At the age of 16, Hockett enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where he received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in ancient history. While enrolled at Ohio State, Hockett became interested in the work of Leonard Bloomfield, a leading figure in the field of structural linguistics. Hockett continued his education at Yale University where he studied anthropology and linguistics and received his PhD in anthropology in 1939. While studying at Yale, Hockett studied with several other influential linguists such as Edward Sapir, George P. Murdock, and Benjamin Whorf. Hockett's dissertation was based on his fieldwork in Potawatomi; his paper on Potawatomi syntax was published in Language in 1939. In 1948 his dissertation was published as a series in the International Journal of American Linguistics. Following fieldwork in Kickapoo and Michoacán, Mexico, Hockett did two years of postdoctoral study with Leonard Bloomfield in Chicago and Michigan.

Hockett began his teaching career in 1946 as an assistant professor of linguistics in the Division of Modern Languages at Cornell University where he was responsible for directing the Chinese language program. In 1957, Hockett became a member of Cornell's anthropology department and continued to teach anthropology and linguistics until he retired to emeritus status in 1982. In 1986, he took up an adjunct post at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he remained active until his death in 2000.

Charles Hockett held membership among many academic institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.

In addition to making many contributions to the field of structural linguistics, Hockett also considered such things as Whorfian Theory, jokes, the nature of writing systems, slips of the tongue, and animal communication and their relativeness to speech.

Outside the realm of linguistics and anthropology, Hockett practiced musical performance and composition. Hockett composed a full-length opera called The Love of Doña Rosita which was based on a play by Federico García Lorca and premiered at Ithaca College by the Ithaca Opera.

Hockett and his wife Shirley were vital leaders in the development of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra in Ithaca, New York. In appreciation of the Hocketts' hard work and dedication to the Ithaca community, Ithaca College established the Charles F. Hockett Music Scholarship, the Shirley and Chas Hockett Chamber Music Concert Series, and the Hockett Family Recital Hall.

In his paper "A Note on Structure", he proposes that linguistics can be seen as "a game and as a science." A linguist as a player in the game of languages has the freedom to experiment on all utterances of a language, but must ensure that "all the utterances of the corpus must be taken into account." Late in his career, he was known for his stinging criticism of Chomskyan linguistics.