Patrick Hanks

Patrick Hanks is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He has edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names. He was educated at Ardingly College, University College, Oxford and Masaryk University. After graduation from Oxford, he started his lexicographic career as editor of the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary. In 1970, he was appointed editor of Collins English Dictionary. From 1980 to 1983, he was director of the Names Research Unit of the University of Essex, England, where he began a PhD under the supervision of Yorick Wilks. In 1983, he was appointed managing editor of COBUILD, and in 1987 he took on the additional role of chief editor of English dictionaries for Collins. 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. From 1990 to 2000, he served as chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press.