English Language

Names Studies

I am a lexicographer, onomastician, and corpus linguist, currently based at the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol) and the Institute for Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Charles University in Prague. I am also a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton.

From 1990 to 2000 I was chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press. In the 1980s I was project manager of the first edition of the Cobuild dictionary.I was also chief editor of Collins English dictionaries.

My current research interests are:

  1. personal names: origin and history of family names; convention and creativity in name giving;
  2. lexical analysis: mapping meaning onto use and corpus-based syntagmatic analysis of lexical regularities;
  3. analysis of intentional lexical irregularities i.e. creative and innovative use of language;
  4. similes and metaphors.

With colleagues based at UWE, I am currently compiling a database of all the family names in the UK, with information about their linguistic and social origins, history, and geographical distribution. (NB: this is primarily a linguistic resource rather than a genealogical one, although we welcome exchanges of scholarly information with the genealogical community.)

In Prague and Wolverhampton, I am developing a technique called Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA). The basis principle of this work is to attach meanings to patterns of usage ("constructions"or words in context), rather than to words in isolation.

Contact email:  patrick.w.hanks@gmail.com