Life with Unix says: The K in K&R and awk. Co—authored The C Programming Language which set style for how most people write C. Wrote ratfor, ditroff, eqn and pic. Shared co-responsibility for Version 7.

A Research Unix Reader says: Brian W. Kernighan, expositor par excellence, coined the name UNIX, popularized the tools philosophy [6], wrote the best tutorials, and became a prolific inventor of specialized “little languages”: ratfor, eqn, awk and pic. The Center's typesetting guru since the untimely death of Joe Ossanna, Brian produced the current “device-independent” version of troff and postprocessors for particular hardware.