Patrick Hanks is a lexicographer and corpus linguist. He was chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press from 1990 to 2000. In the 1980s he was managing editor of the Cobuild project and chief editor of Collins English dictionaries. He is author and co-author of many papers on lexicography, lexical analysis, and similes and metaphor. He is currently compiling a 6-volume collection of papers on lexicology in the Routledge Critical Concepts series.

His main research interests are:

1. precision and vagueness in language;
2. mapping meaning onto use -- corpus-based syntagmatic analysis of lexical regularities;
3. similes and metaphors: creative and innovative use of language;
4. personal names: origin and history, convention and creativity in naming.

He is Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Language Processing, Faculty of Informatics, at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He is a consultant on lexicographical methodology to the Institute for the Czech Language in Prague, to Patakis Publishers, Athens, and others.

Contact:

hanks@fi.muni.cz