My first job was with Longman, who at that time were just completing work on the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). I worked with the LDOCE team on quite a different project – a British English version of the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which was later published as the Longman Dictionary of the English Language. It was a formative experience because we had to learn the classical lexicographic theory that Merriam follows – but at the same time my ex-LDOCE colleagues wanted to write a much simpler and clearer dictionary that was closer to EFL principles. I left Longman believing strongly that dictionaries have to have definitions that users can understand – even for specialist terms, though this isn’t always easy to achieve.

I left Longman in the early 80s and moved into bilingual lexicography, where I worked on the dictionary that was eventually published as the Oxford English-Spanish Dictionary. I was responsible for creating an English ‘source file’ or ‘framework’ – an analysis of English meanings and collocations that could be translated into various languages. Bilingual lexicography was completely different from native-speaker work – ideas such as giving different priority to encoding and decoding words, and of course the importance of collocation, were new and exciting to me. The problem of what to do with words that had no direct equivalent in the other language was also fascinating.

From 1990–1996 I worked for Larousse, the French publisher, who were developing a new range of bilingual dictionaries. My role was to head up a London-based editorial team – part of a network of offices of bilingual lexicographers in London, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Rio de Janeiro, and of course Paris. It was wonderful to have access to editors working in their own country, in their own language, and in their own dictionary tradition. At Larousse we also created an ELF dictionary – a first attempt to cover English as a lingua franca, as opposed to a culturally specific British or American EFL dictionary.

In 1996 I came back to native-speaker lexicography again when I joined Bloomsbury to head up the team of the Encarta World English Dictionary, which Bloomsbury was producing in conjunction with Microsoft. This text was created in British and American English simultaneously – a principle we followed on the Macmillan English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary. I am now Dictionaries Publisher in the Bloomsbury Reference Division.

Dictionaries have changed so much since I started out, at least in Britain, and I feel enormously lucky to have had a career in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. What has been interesting to me is the way that the different types of dictionary have influenced one another over the years: British native-speaker dictionaries have become more like American native-speaker dictionaries, and also more like EFL dictionaries. British EFL dictionaries have become less like native-speaker dictionaries and more like bilingual dictionaries. The reasons for these changes are not hard to find: firstly corpus, and the way it has influenced the information we show in dictionaries, and secondly the huge commercial success of British EFL dictionaries, which makes constant innovation both possible and necessary. What will increasingly affect the dictionaries we write is of course electronic communication, whether it’s CDs, email, or text messaging.

I live in London with my partner, a stepdaughter, and two cats. My ambition? To retire to the country and create a truly amazing garden.