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Patrick Hanks (born 24 March 1940) is an English
lexicographer Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretica ...
, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He has edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of
personal names A personal name, or full name, in onomastic terminology also known as prosoponym (from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον / ''prósōpon'' - person, and ὄνομα / ''onoma'' - name), is the set of names by which an individual person is known, ...
.


Background

Hanks was educated at Ardingly College,
University College, Oxford University College (in full The College of the Great Hall of the University of Oxford, colloquially referred to as "Univ") is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It has a claim to being the oldest college of the unive ...
(BA, MA) and
Masaryk University Masaryk University (MU) ( cs, Masarykova univerzita; la, Universitas Masarykiana Brunensis) is the second largest university in the Czech Republic, a member of the Compostela Group and the Utrecht Network. Founded in 1919 in Brno as the se ...
(PhD). After graduation from Oxford, he started his lexicographic career as editor of the ''Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary'' (1971). In 1970, he was appointed editor of ''Collins English Dictionary'' (1979). From 1980 to 1983, he was director of the Names Research Unit of the
University of Essex The University of Essex is a public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the ancient arms attributed to the Kingdom of Es ...
, England, where he began a PhD under the supervision of
Yorick Wilks Yorick Wilks FBCS (born 27 October 1939), a British computer scientist, is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College (a post created especiall ...
. In 1983, he was appointed managing editor of
COBUILD COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers. The facility was initially led by Professor Jo ...
, and in 1987 he took on the additional role of chief editor of English dictionaries for Collins (now
HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...
). In the summer of 1988 and 1989 he was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, where he co-authored with Ken Church influential papers on corpus-based statistical methods in lexical analysis.


Career

From 1990 to 2000, Hanks served as chief editor of current English dictionaries at
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
(OUP). In 1991 to 1992, he was joint principal investigator (with Mary-Claire van Leunen) of the HECTOR project at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto, CA. The HECTOR project was a collaboration between OUP and DEC, and although its results were never published, they served as a basis for the ''New Oxford Dictionary of English'' (1998), while the lexicographers working on it were also guinea-pig users in the development of one of the earliest search engines (
AltaVista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...
). On the basis of the COBUILD and HECTOR research in corpus analysis, Hanks began to develop his theory of Norms and Exploitations. From 2001 to 2005, he was adjunct professor of computational lexicography at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, where he worked closely with James Pustejovsky. In 2003, he was appointed consultant and visiting scientist to the Collocations Project and Electronic Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) at the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the German states of Berlin a ...
(BBAW) headed by Christiane Fellbaum. He has also served as a consultant on lexicographical methodology to the Institute of the Czech Language in Prague, to Patakis Publishers in Athens, and others. Patrick Hanks is author of many papers on
lexical analysis In computer science, lexical analysis, lexing or tokenization is the process of converting a sequence of characters (such as in a computer program or web page) into a sequence of ''lexical tokens'' ( strings with an assigned and thus identified ...
,
lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoreti ...
, onomastics, and
simile A simile () is a figure of speech that directly ''compares'' two things. Similes differ from other metaphors by highlighting the similarities between two things using comparison words such as "like", "as", "so", or "than", while other metaphors c ...
s and
metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wi ...
. He is editor in chief of the ''Dictionary of American Family Names'' (3 volumes, OUP 2003), and is co-author with Flavia Hodges and Kate Hardcastle of the ''
Oxford Dictionary of First Names ''A Dictionary of First Names'' is an onomastic work of reference on given names, published by Oxford University Press, edited by Patrick Hanks Patrick Hanks (born 24 March 1940) is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastici ...
'' (1990, 2006). He was section editor for lexicography in the second edition of the
Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...
''
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics The ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', first published in 1994 (edited by Ronald E. Asher), with a 2nd edition in 2006 (edited by Keith Brown), is an encyclopedia of all matters related to language and linguistics. Reception The ''Jo ...
'' (ELL2; 2005), edited by Keith Brown, for which he commissioned survey articles on lexicography in all the world's major languages and on major issues in lexicography and lexicology. He edited a multivolume collection covering all aspects of lexicology for
Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...
, and, with Rachel Giora, a companion collection covering all aspects of metaphor and figurative language. From 2005 to 2009 he was a senior research associate at the Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University Masaryk University (MU) ( cs, Masarykova univerzita; la, Universitas Masarykiana Brunensis) is the second largest university in the Czech Republic, a member of the Compostela Group and the Utrecht Network. Founded in 1919 in Brno as the se ...
, Brno,
Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...
, where he developed the empirical procedure of Corpus Pattern Analysis,Hanks, Patrick (2004
Corpus Pattern Analysis
In Williams, G. and Vessier, S. (eds.), ''Proceedings of the Eleventh EURALEX International Congress, EURALEX 2004, Lorient, France, 6–10 July''. Lorient: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université de Bretagne Sud. 87–97.
which links word meaning to patterns of word use and systematically distinguishes patterns of normal usage from creative uses. After a year in Prague at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, he returned to England as lead researcher on the FaNUK project in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics in the
University of the West of England The University of the West of England (also known as UWE Bristol) is a public research university, located in and around Bristol, England. The institution was know as the Bristol Polytechnic in 1970; it received university status in 1992 and ...
(UWE, Bristol), researching the origins, history, and geographical distribution of family names in the UK. He is currently Professor in Lexicography at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) in the
University of Wolverhampton The University of Wolverhampton is a public university located on four campuses across the West Midlands, Shropshire and Staffordshire in England. The roots of the university lie in the Wolverhampton Tradesmen's and Mechanics' Institute founde ...
, working on projects in Corpus Pattern Analysis.


See also

*
List of lexicographers A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...


References


External links


Patrick Hanks – Official Website
*


Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hanks, Patrick Living people 1940 births People educated at Ardingly College Alumni of University College, Oxford English lexicographers Place of birth missing (living people) Masaryk University faculty Corpus linguists