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It all
started when I answered Longman’s ad in The Guardian for
American English speakers in the summer of 1992. If you had asked me
prior to that if I’d wanted to be a lexicographer, I’d have said
that it wasn’t the first thing to cross my mind. However, I had
just finished my Master’s Degree in Literature with a TEFL course
and some English language teaching under my belt, and it was the
first ad I’d ever seen in a Jobs section that looked tailor-made
for me.
Seven years later after working my
way through the Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Dictionary
of American English, the Idioms Dictionaries, and the Advanced
American Dictionary, I made the decision to go freelance. It was
then that I began working for Bloomsbury on the Macmillan English
Dictionary and later the Macmillan Essential Dictionary. My favorite parts of the job have always involved
working with corpora, especially to discover how spoken language and
idioms work. It has also been very interesting to see the language
change – and there have been quite a few changes, even in the ten
years I have been in the business.
Life is not all dictionaries by any
means. My husband Duncan and I (who met at Longman) have a
4-year-old son, Sam, who keeps life very lively and we are expecting
another child in early May 2003. We left London in
2000 to live in the US near my family and now live in Cambridge
Massachusetts, just outside Boston. We love to travel, although
these days we do less of it. My favorite trip, thus far, has been to
Zimbabwe. However, I am enjoying exploring my country again,
especially the mountains, lakes, and beaches in this area. We’re
hoping to do lots of traveling and camping all over the country,
especially out West, in the next few years. I also love film and
music of all kinds. One of these days I’ll take up the violin
again – a pursuit from a former life – and get back into T’ai
Chi. There’s so much to do! Not to mention the dictionaries to be
written … |
