Sir William Robertson Nicoll was born on October 10, 1851, in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

He was a Scottish Free Church minister, journalist, and editor. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and graduated from the University of Aberdeen (M.A., 1870). He studied for the ministry at the Free Church Divinity Hall until 1874, when he was ordained minister at Dufftown, Banffshire. In 1884, he became editor of The Expositor, a position he held until his death. In 1885, Nicoll was forced to retire from pastoral ministry after an attack of typhoid had badly damaged his lung. In 1886, he moved to London and he helped found the British Weekly, a Nonconformist newspaper. Nicoll secured many writers of exceptional talent for his paper, e.g., Marcus Dods, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren, Alexander Whyte, Alexander Maclaren, Carnegie Simpson, and James Denney, to which he added his own considerable talents as a contributor. He began a highly popular feature, "Correspondence of Claudius Clear", which enabled him to share his interests and his readings with his readers. He was also the founding editor of The Bookman from 1891. Among his other enterprises were The Expositor's Bible, and The Theological Educator. He edited The Expositor's Greek Testament (from 1897). He also edited a series of Contemporary Writers (from 1894), and Literary Lives (from 1904). He was knighted by King Edward VII in 1909 and was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1921 Birthday Honours.

In 1878, he married Isabella Dunlop (1857–1894) and in 1897, he remarried Catherine Pollard (1864–1960). He died on May 4, 1923, in London, England.