Gwyneth Fox

I'm Gwyneth Fox. I'm the Dictionaries Publisher for Macmillan. That means that I am one of the people who decides which EFL dictionaries Macmillan will publish, and what they will look like. In fact, I am very much responsible for the final look of the dictionaries and the quality of the text. So I'm the person to blame if you find things you really don't like!

My first degree was in English language and literature from the University of Edinburgh, but I've never really used the 'literature' part of it: I've been a teacher of the English language for the whole of my career. I've taught at different levels – everything from 3-year-olds at nursery through to university, where I've spent most of the past twenty five years teaching and researching. My first job was teaching adults at an American language school in Rome, which I enjoyed very much: there can't be many better places to start a career

Although I worked in the English department at the University of Birmingham from 1981 to 2003 and did quite a lot of teaching, until 1997 most of my time was taken up by working on the COBUILD project. The project was set up with two main aims: to use corpus data to find out how people are using English at the present time; and then to put the research findings into dictionaries, grammars, and other reference books for people learning English as a foreign or second language. I loved those early days. I couldn't believe that I was actually paid to sit and look at words!

I've lived in Birmingham for more than 30 years now, and I can't really imagine living permanently anywhere else. It's a big city, not as dirty or industrial as it used to be; it's vibrant; there's a lot of good theatre and cinema; and it has the best concert venue in Europe, if not in the world. The Symphony Hall is renowned worldwide for its acoustics, its beauty, and the quality of music played there. You won't be surprised to hear that most of my spare money is spent there! Birmingham isn't beautiful, even I can't claim that, but it is a good place to live.

Macmillan is in Oxford, a one and a quarter hour drive from Birmingham. I go once or twice a week, and enjoy the drive, listening either to classical music or to spoken texts. I’ve worked through a wonderful set of Proust, and have just embarked on an equally good version of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I enjoy my work. Dictionaries are really interesting books, full of fascinating information about the language. Our challenge is to make them accessible and easy to use. I'm very keen to get feedback on what we've done in the Macmillan Dictionaries series, and I'd like ideas on what we might do in the future. So please get in touch with me via this page or by email on G.Fox@macmillan.com. I promise I'll reply!

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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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Jonathan Marks

I come from Leeds. I did my first degree at the University of Cambridge, and then a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, during which I quickly abandoned my ambition to teach children in the UK state system. But at the end of that year I got a summer job teaching English as a foreign language to adults, found that I liked it, and I've never looked back since.

I've lived in Poland since 1991. I live in eba on the Baltic coast and work on a freelance basis as a teacher, teacher-trainer, writer and translator, mostly in Poland but sometimes further afield, too. Before Poland, I worked in Germany, Sweden, and for a long time at ILC in Hastings, England. While I was there I did an MA in TEFL at Reading and round about the same time joined IATEFL and started attending the annual conferences. For me this was an important step towards becoming part of a bigger, international community of teachers, and expanding my horizons beyond the classroom and the day-to-day work of teaching. I was one of the founder members of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group and am currently its joint coordinator. I've served on the main IATEFL committee and the publications committee.

As well as Inside Teaching (Macmillan), I'm co-author of The Pronunciation Book (Longman), one of the authors of Bridges (Klett) – an adult course for German-speaking learners – and the PONS Polish-English Dictionary (LektorKlett). My English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP) is due out at the beginning of 2007, and I'm working – with lots of other people, of course! – on another Polish-English dictionary.

I like studying languages and tracing connections between them, and I'm – still – intrigued by the question: Given that so many people in the world learn foreign and second languages informally, without books, teachers and so on, how can formal instruction help most effectively, as opposed to interfering with the learning process?

I'm also keen on walking, travelling by train, photography, history, architecture, landscape, folklore and so on. I spend an enormous amount of time listening to music, and if I get reincarnated I want to be a musician next time round.

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Elizabeth Potter

Like most people who write dictionaries for a living, I became a lexicographer by accident. After several years working in Italy and Scotland as an ELT teacher and course organiser, and as a translator and teacher of Italian, I was looking for a change. In 1990, a friend spotted a job ad for bilingual lexicographers at Longman. I applied and got the job, and discovered something I had never suspected – that dictionaries are written by people like me. After two years at Longman, I moved to COBUILD, where I worked on monolingual learner's dictionaries. Since leaving COBUILD in 1999 to work freelance, I have contributed to a variety of monolingual and bilingual learner's dictionaries, and for several years I wrote a weekly web article about English.

When I'm not slaving over a hot dictionary entry, I like to spend my time gardening, and enjoying the company of my husband and two children. I also sing in a choir and go to yoga classes, though despite many years of trying I still can't manage the lotus position.

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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 in Hungary and briefly in the Netherlands.

I work as Commissioning Editor in the Macmillan Dictionaries editorial group and I am also one of the editors of the Macmillan English Dictionaries resource site.

I am based in Amsterdam but frequently travel to the UK. I'm a keen but rather lazy runner. In my free time I enjoy squash, films, books and the company of our 13 year-old cat called Cica.

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Cover photographs courtesy of Corbis (competition) and STOCKBYTE (British and American Culture)
Cover design by Mairi MacDonald