Michael Rundell
Chancellor, distinguished friends, colleagues, graduands and guests.
Michael Rundell is a leading professional lexicographer and writer. He is an expert in the field of pedagogical English dictionaries and has been involved in designing and developing several major language corpora (including the British National Corpus). He has been at the forefront of applying computational techniques to the analysis of corpus data and the compilation of dictionary text. He is now deeply involved in the new ‘lexicographic revolution’ – the migration of dictionary resources from print to digital media.
Mike’s interest in language began, when aged 11 and learning French, he came to the realization that there was more to understanding another language than simply translating it word for word from English. Since then he has been fascinated by the everyday miracles involved in how we communicate using language.
Following a short period as a University lecturer and then as an English language teacher, Mike became a dictionary-editor and lexicographer in 1980. Although, it was by accident that he began working in the dictionary field, he has been lucky enough to be involved in all the major developments in the field over the last twenty years or so. As Managing Editor at Longman Dictionaries for ten years from 1984 to 1994, he was responsible for several large dictionary projects, including the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Longman Language Activator. Since 1998, he has been a lexicographic consultant for Bloomsbury Publishing plc, who planned and wrote the Macmillan English Dictionary.
As well as designing, editing and project-managing dictionaries, he has been closely involved in the design and collection of several major corpora, including the Longman Learner Corpus (the first of its type), and the British National Corpus. He has also worked with computer scientists and software engineers in the creation of computational tools for analyzing the data in corpora, most recently the Sketch Engine – a state-of-the-art corpus query system developed by his colleague Adam Kilgarriff.
He has trained dozens of lexicographers, and is a respected teacher in this field. Throughout the 1990s he taught lexicography at the University of Exeter, and in 2002-03 he taught on the MSc in Lexical Computing and Lexicography at the University of Brighton. For the past five years, he has been been working with two other colleagues to develop their own company, Lexicography MasterClass Ltd. LexMC has run training workshops in lexicography and lexical computing around the world and managed dictionary projects for a number of other institutions. Their annual Lexicom workshop is now in its eighth year, and the most recent venture was managing a major new project (funded by the Irish government) to produce a new, corpus-based English-Irish dictionary.
He has written numerous papers on corpus-based pedagogical lexicography, contributed to conferences around the world, and has also written a regular column on aspects of corpora in language learning for the Pilgrims’ webzine, Humanizing Language Teaching. He is co-author (with Sue Atkins) of the definitive Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, which was first published in 2008. He is also a founder member of Euralex, the International Congress dedicated to dictionary making and their use. He was a member of the Euralex Board for four years, from 2006 to 2010, and took a key role in the project to digitize the Association’s past Proceedings.
Apart from writing dictionaries, he trains regularly in Tai Chi, is trying to learn Spanish and (to a more limited extent) Japanese, and is active in local environmental politics. He also loves watching (but not playing) cricket, and in 1995 combined two things close to his heart when he wrote The Dictionary of Cricket for the Oxford University Press.
His wife Maggy is a writer and editor and they have two children Raphael and Jess.
In recognition of his contribution to the description of the English language and to the field of pedagogical lexicography, Coventry University, by decision of the Academic Board, has the privilege of conferring the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Michael Rundell.