Macmillan English Dictionary Resource Site

I have been engaged in lexicography since 1961 when I took a position as lexicographer with Funk & Wagnalls, a venerable dictionary house in New York City. I was subsequently appointed editor-in-chief at Funk & Wagnalls and was responsible there for a number of adult, native-speaker dictionaries of varying size. In 1970 I joined Doubleday & Co. and was the editor-in-chief of The Doubleday Dictionary (1975) and Doubleday Roget’s Thesaurus (1977), the latter still in print. In 1977 I took a position with John Wiley & Sons to be responsible for the preparation as editor-in-chief of a major, multivolume medical dictionary, the International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology, which was published in three volumes in 1986. In 1988 I joined the New York office of Cambridge University Press as Editorial Director of its North American Branch and was for a while engaged with administrative duties as well as the development and management of reference books and language-related books. In 1995 I undertook the editorship of the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, an intermediate-level learners’ dictionary published in 2000.

I have remained active within the professional community of lexicographers, and am a fellow and past president of the Dictionary Society of North America. I have also published numerous professional articles. Following my retirement from Cambridge University Press in October 1998, I spent a year completing work on the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, and then began a thorough revision of my book, Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography, originally published in 1984 by Scribner’s. In the intervening years, the computer revolution had changed many aspects of dictionary work, and since my work on the Cambridge dictionary had employed the latest technological advances in lexicography, I was able to use this experience to inform the Second Edition of my book, which was published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press. I remain active in lexicography as a freelancer, and I enjoyed working on the Macmillan English Dictionary, especially since it was an advanced-level dictionary and required a different strategy entirely from that needed for an intermediate-level dictionary.