Meet the editor-in-chief
EL Gazette - May 2007
Melanie Butler
Melanie Butler: How did you
become a lexicographer?
Michael Rundell: By accident,
mostly. Back in 1980 I was
involved in the lower reaches of
Tefl in London. I’d just completed
a PGCE in Tefl and my
tutor, Monica Vincent, to whom
I am eternally grateful, drew my
attention to an ad for freelance
lexicographers.
I spent a couple of years learning
about lexicography from
Della Summers – one of the best
people in the business. Then, by
another stroke of luck, I ended
up at Birmingham working on
the early stages of the Cobuild
project under the late John Sinclair.
I was lucky – I learned
about dictionary making from
Della and about language analysis
and working with a corpus
from John Sinclair.
MB: And now you are editor-in-chief of the Macmillan English
Dictionary. But what does
an editor-in-chief actually do?
MR: I see the job as about
setting a philosophy and a personality
for the dictionary.
MB: Philosophy?
MR: Yes. I see the philosophy
of the Macmillan English Dictionary as being leading edge
in terms of the language software
we use, aware of relevant
linguistic theory but making it
user-friendly for both teachers
and students, using elements
like design.
MB: And the personality would
be like an Apple Mac computer?
MR: I hope so! Of course,
once you’ve got the philosophy
you’ve still got to work out your
editorial plan and gather a team
of people around you to produce
the book. On the Macmillan dictionary
we had editors working
with me to create the text, but
we also got valuable input from
the Macmillan side, headed by
Gwyneth Fox. I
think that gave
us a real edge,
as did the advice
we got from outside
experts like
Michael Hoey
and Simon Greenall.
MB: What’s the best thing
about being a lexicographer?
MR: A lot of people think
it’s all very boring. It’s really
not. Everything to do with dictionary
making, everything that
affects it, is in a state of constant
change. The language is always
renewing itself.
Our understanding of how
language works is always
improving. The software just
gets better and better. And as
for the language resources available,
when Cobuild first came
out it was based on a seven-million-
word corpus, which was
absolutely amazing at the time.
Now there are corpuses with a
billion words. Just when you
think you’ve got the hang of it,
something new comes along.
MB: For example?
MR: For the new edition of the
Macmillan English Dictionary,
we wanted to look at the kind
of language that learners actually
use, particularly in academic
writing. The Macmillan dictionary
team are pretty skilled at
analysing corpus data for native
speakers, but what about a non-native
speaker corpus?
The best way to learn about a
new aspect of a field is to work
with the experts, so we worked
with Sylviane Granger and her
team at the University of Louvain,
using their learner corpus.
It was a very interesting, rewarding
experience.
MB: Where do you think dictionaries
are now?
MR: There’s now so much
available free on the web, the
challenge for us is to provide
our users with something they
can’t get for free. The work
we’ve done with Sylviane and
the Louvain team, for example,
means the new edition includes
well-researched materials to help
learners become better writers – that’s providing something
a) they need and b) isn’t easily
available elsewhere.
One of the things that took
me ages to figure out was that
dictionaries are not books about
words but books about language.
That hit me about three years ago.
So much of linguistic behaviour
follows patterns and conventions,
something that was articulated
most clearly by John Sinclair.
Most English language teaching
dictionaries now include some
of these elements. But there is
always more we can do.
In our new edition, for example,
we have included a set of
language awareness essays – written by
experts in the
field rather than lexicographers.
We have Frank
Boers on idioms,
Rosamund
Moon on metaphor and Michael
Hoey introducing his concept
of lexical priming. What we are
trying to do is give the learners
information on the systems in
the language, a sense of how it
works.
There’s lots more we can say
in dictionaries. Pragmatics for
example. I don’t think we’ve
really cracked how to include
that in a way that helps learners.
MB: Isn’t there a danger that
dictionaries will just become
bigger and bigger, with more
and more features?
MR: English language teaching
dictionary makers are all still
using the Hornby model from
1948, one large universal monolingual
dictionary for learners
from all language groups and for
all language needs. I think the
ELT dictionary will gradually
morph into something different,
into a kind of collection of linguistic
resources with learners
accessing the resources that suit
them. What we are talking about
is a dictionary that is customised
by the user rather than a onesize-fits-all version.
In our new edition we have
used the CD-ROM to help learners
choose what they need to
know. They can look at a complete
dictionary entry if they like,
or they can look at a stripped-down version and then choose,
by clicking on buttons, to get any
other information they need, like
collocation for example, or inflections.
We’re trying to reflect the
way the web has taught people to
access information, to start from
a simple entry and then
broaden out or narrow
down their search.
MB: What kind of
person makes a good
lexicographer?
MR: It’s not that different
from what makes
a good journalist really.
You need to be able to
analyse facts and then
present them to users
in a way that is relevant,
straightforward
and approachable. It’s
the last bit that is the
hardest – writing sharp
definitions. The very
best definitions combine
economy and accuracy
and some sort of punch – what mathematicians
call elegance. None of us get it
right all the time.
MB: How can readers try out
their hand at lexicography?
MR: They could
try enrolling in one of the courses
my company runs. You can find
out about them at www.lexmasterclass.com.
Michael Rundell is editor-in-chief
of the Macmillan English
Dictionary and a director of
Lexicography MasterClass. He
has been a lexicographer for
27 years. His special area is
monolingual English dictionaries
designed for learners.