I was Managing Editor at Longman Dictionaries for ten years (1984–1994), and was responsible for several major dictionary projects there, including the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987 and 1995 editions), and the Longman Language Activator (1993). Since 1998, I have been a lexicographic consultant for Bloomsbury Publishing plc, who planned and wrote the Macmillan English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary for Macmillan.

As well as developing and editing dictionaries, I’ve been very involved in the design and collection of several English corpora, including the British National Corpus. I am also interested in computational tools for retrieving data from corpora, and their use in dictionary-making.

I have had a long involvement in teaching lexicography and training lexicographers. Throughout the 1990s, I taught on courses at the University of Exeter. More recently, I have been working in partnership with Sue Atkins and Adam Kilgarriff (as the "Lexicography MasterClass") to provide training workshops in lexicography and lexical computing, in venues such as South Africa, the US, and especially the University of Brighton, where I am an Honorary Fellow. Our "Lexicom" workshop (www.lexmasterclass.com) is now an annual event. A new MSc programme in lexical computing and lexicography was launched in Brighton in 2002 (www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/courses/MScLex), and includes a short course on 'Corpora and Language Teaching' (www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/courses/CPDLex/modules/LCM12.html)

I have written numerous papers on corpus-based pedagogical lexicography, and I also write a regular column on aspects of corpora in language learning for the Pilgrims’ "webzine" Humanizing Language Teaching (www.hltmag.co.uk).

Apart from writing dictionaries, I train regularly in T’ai Chi, I’m trying to learn Spanish, and I am active in local politics (as a member of an environmental group opposing inappropriate development in Canterbury, where I live). I also like movies and watching (but not playing) cricket, and wrote The Dictionary of Cricket (OUP) in 1995.

My wife Maggy is a writer and editor. My son Raphael is 23 and works in the music business in London (as well as moonlighting as a DJ), and my daughter Jess is 18, studying for A levels and thinking of doing philosophy at university.

Dictionaries have improved enormously in the last ten years, but I’m convinced there is still plenty of scope for making them even better – and this is why working with dictionaries is always so interesting and challenging. As the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, once said: ‘We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.’

Introduction to MED
How MED was Written