Jeremy Bale

Jeremy has an MA in Arabic from Cambridge University and is a graduate of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, Lebanon. Jeremy has lived in Qatar, Arabian Gulf, working in the oil industry and has worked as an Arabic translator and interpreter for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

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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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Caroline Krantz

Caroline is a teacher, teacher trainer and ELT materials writer, based in Oxford, UK. She did a degree in Latin and French at Oxford University from 1985-1988 and then after a few years working in the world of advertising in London, she moved to Barcelona where she began her career as an English language teacher. She returned to the UK in 1993 and worked at the Swan School of English in Oxford until April 2005. During her time at the Swan School she was involved in teacher training and development, both in-house and in Peru.

She now teaches on a freelance basis in both the private and state sectors and writes teacher's resource materials.

When she's not in the classroom or at her desk writing, Caroline loves to spend as much time as possible cooking, eating, discovering new recipes and restaurants, exploring new food markets. In other words, she's 'a bit of a foodie'.

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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 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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