John Anyan

John has been teaching English as a Second Language for some seventeen years now, including stints in Singapore and The Middle East but principally in Thailand. His conspicuous lack of success in learning languages has helped him immensely in understanding the difficulties that students have in learning English as a Second Language. His language learning ineptitude is not shared by his wife Jum, who is a freelance Thai/English translator.

In his spare time John is a keen reader, and a long suffering supporter of West Bromwich Albion Football Club.

John has recently taken up a teaching post in The United Arab Emirates.

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Andrew Holmes

I am a freelance writer, editor, and proof-reader living in Scotland. I was educated at Glasgow University where I completed my degree in Politics. After university I joined HarperCollins Publishers where I worked as a lexicographer on numerous dictionaries and thesauruses, and even did the occasional radio interview during publicity campaigns.

I left Collins Dictionaries in 2004 and since then and have worked from home, contributing to dictionaries as well as other reference works. Recent publications that I have been involved with include the Chambers Sports Factfinder (where I edited a number of sections including football, horse racing, and snooker) and TV Talk (a light-hearted look at words and phrases that have become well known through television).

When not tapping away at my keyboard I take an interest in current affairs, history, and classical music. I'm a keen sports fan although my support of Hibernian FC is more often a source of sorrow than enjoyment.

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Susan Jellis

Susan is a freelance editor, lexicographer and writer. She was one of the original editors of the Cambridge International Dictionary of English and also worked on the Macmillan English Dictionary. Although her background is in languages and linguistics, she worked in science publishing for many years and has a passion for presenting science in clear, straightforward and accurate language, often advising on this for dictionaries. While working for Bloomsbury, she was Managing Editor of the Encarta dictionary series, including the Bloomsbury English Dictionary, the second edition of the Encarta World English Dictionary, and was General Editor of the Encarta Thesaurus. She is currently involved in an oral history project in the Kings Cross Redevelopment Area, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, for the British Library Archive.

Working freelance has allowed her time to formalise a longstanding interest in garden history by taking a qualification at Birkbeck College – and time for field trips. She can also indulge more in theatre and ballet as well as in reading. Her interest in football arose of necessity, as the only female in the family, but it was always the vocabulary of commentary and analysis that held her attention, with its wonderful expressions, formulas and cliche

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Sinda Lopez

Sinda Lopez was born in Oxfordshire, UK of Spanish parents. She has lived in both in England and Spain and is bilingual in both languages.

Shortly after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in French and Spanish, she began her lexicographic career in 1987 working on the Oxford Spanish Dictionary. Over the years, she has been Managing Editor of Bilingual Dictionaries at Longman and Routledge and decided to go freelance in 1999, prior to the birth of her second child. As a freelance lexicographer she has worked on a wide range of both monolingual and bilingual projects for various publishers including Oxford University Press, Longman, Larousse, Bloomsbury and Macmillan. In the last five years, she has focused mainly on project management of dictionaries which have included several Larousse titles and recently the Macmillan Diccionario Pocket.

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Mairi MacDonald

I first became interested in learner's dictionaries more than 10 years ago while teaching English in Lithuania. I became a lexicographer with Cambridge University Press in 1999 and since then I have been involved in several ELT publications including Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, the CD-ROM versions of the Macmillan English Dictionary and Macmillan Essential Dictionary as well as the Macmillan Schools Dictionary website.

I have contributed to several websites – writing articles, designing web pages as well as adapting and creating interactive activities and games.

I work from my home in Perthshire and most of my spare time is taken up with my baby son Aonghas (Gaelic for 'Angus') and walking my parents' border collie, Misty.

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Kerry Maxwell

Kerry has a first degree in computational linguistics and an MA in theoretical linguistics from the University of Manchester, specialising in syntactic theory.

For several years she worked as a researcher at Manchester and Essex universities, where in connection with European projects on machine translation, she was involved in computational lexicography, co-ordinating research in computational descriptions of compounds and collocations, and presenting her work in various international academic contexts.

In 1993 she joined Cambridge University Press as a lexicographer/editor and grammar consultant, and worked on a large number of Cambridge learner's dictionaries, including the English Pronouncing Dictionary, the Cambridge International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary in print and CD-ROM versions.

In June 2001 Kerry moved to York where she now works as a freelance editor/lexicographer and is involved in a range of dictionary and grammar projects.

Among the publications she has contributed to are Advanced Grammar In Use (2nd Ed.) and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary for Cambridge University Press, the Collins COBUILD Elementary Grammar (2nd Ed.), Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus and the Macmillan School Dictionary. As well as being the regular author of the MED website's 'Word of the Week' column, she regularly writes for MED Magazine and co-authors grammar reference material for onestopenglish.

Most of her spare time is spent looking after her two young sons Tom and Sam, though she enjoys walking, swimming and any opportunity to travel.

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I come from Hungary. I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Szeged in south-east Hungary where I also completed an English Language Teaching degree. I taught English as a foreign language in Hungary and in the Netherlands.

I am Managing Editor of the Macmillan Dictionaries series and was editor of the Macmillan English Dictionary Workbook. I am also one of the editors of the Macmillan English Dictionaries resource site.

I live in Amsterdam and frequently travel to the UK. I'm a keen but rather lazy runner. In my free time I enjoy playing squash, watching films and reading.

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