Diane Nicholls
Thesaurus Editor
I took a circuitous path to lexicography. My first degree, in Russian and French, led on to a postgraduate diploma in translation, which led to a spell working as a translator. I soon realized that translating, while a great discipline, would never allow me the time to really get to grips with and ‘enjoy’ the words.
I returned to academic study and an MLitt in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University, where I spent a lot of my time wondering how I would ever manage to make a living using my language skills. Freelance work on the Cambridge International Dictionary of English provided an entrée into lexicography and my first non-user experience of dictionaries. In career terms, my fate was sealed.
Since 1995 I have worked as a freelance linguist/lexicographer and revelled in the variety and flexibility this role offers. I have worked on software development projects as far away as Moscow and California, on academic research projects closer to home and in Hong Kong and the US, and on a wide variety of dictionary publishing projects, including learner corpora, learner, bilingual and native-speaker dictionaries and thesauruses.
For Macmillan, I produced usage notes for MED and MED2 and was editor of the CD-ROM integrated thesaurus for MED2, as well as contributing to a number of Macmillan’s onestopenglish online resources for both teachers and students. Producing the glossaries for the excellent series of Macmillan Readers takes me on a pleasant detour into English literature, and I have also enjoyed project managing the In Company series of Business English courses on CD-ROM. Meanwhile, writing two series of articles for MED Magazine has given me a welcome chance to get a few things off of my lexicographical chest.
I live in London with my husband, Rory, and our dog, Bob, and during working hours, can usually be found wading up to my neck in words, trying to pin them down or, at least, marshal them into some sort of order while secretly admiring their slipperiness.