MED Profile
Interview with Michael Rundell

Michael Rundell is Editor-in-Chief of the Second Edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary and a director of Lexicography MasterClass. Michael has been a lexicographer for 27 years. His special area is monolingual English dictionaries designed for learners. In this interview, Michael answers questions about dictionary making, what it takes to be a lexicographer and the future of the dictionary.

How did you become a lexicographer?
Michael Rundell: By accident, mostly. Back in 1980 I was involved in the lower reaches of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) in London. I’d just completed a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) in TEFL and my tutor, Monica Vincent, to whom I am eternally grateful, drew my attention to an ad for freelance lexicographers. I spent a couple of years learning about lexicography from Della Summers – one of the best people in the business. Then, by another stroke of luck, I ended up at Birmingham working on the early stages of the COBUILD project under the late John Sinclair. I was lucky – I learned about dictionary making from Della and about language analysis and working with a corpus from John Sinclair.

And now you are editor-in-chief of the Macmillan English Dictionary. But what does an editor-in-chief actually do?
Michael Rundell: I see the job as about setting a philosophy and a personality for the dictionary.

Philosophy?
Michael Rundell: Yes. I see the philosophy of the Macmillan English Dictionary as being leading edge in terms of the language software we use, aware of relevant linguistic theory but making it user-friendly for both teachers and students, using elements like design.

And the personality would be like an Apple Mac computer?
Michael Rundell: I hope so! Of course, once you’ve got the philosophy you’ve still got to work out your editorial plan and gather a team of people around you to produce the book. On the Macmillan English Dictionary we had editors working with me to create the text, but we also got valuable input from the Macmillan side, headed by Gwyneth Fox. I think that gave us a real edge, as did the advice we got from outside experts like Michael Hoey and Simon Greenall.

What’s the best thing about being a lexicographer?
Michael Rundell: A lot of people think it’s all very boring. It’s really not. Everything to do with dictionary making, everything that affects it, is in a state of constant change. The language is always renewing itself. Our understanding of how language works is always improving. The software just gets better and better. And as for the language resources available, when COBUILD first came out it was based on a seven-million-word corpus, which was absolutely amazing at the time. Now there are corpuses with a billion words. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, something new comes along.

For example?
Michael Rundell: For the new edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary, we wanted to look at the kind of language that learners actually use, particularly in academic writing. The Macmillan dictionary team are pretty skilled at analysing corpus data for native speakers, but what about a non-native speaker corpus? The best way to learn about a new aspect of a field is to work with the experts, so we worked with Sylviane Granger and her team at the University of Louvain, using their learner corpus. It was a very interesting and rewarding experience.

Where do you think dictionaries are now?
Michael Rundell: There’s now so much available free on the Web, the challenge for us is to provide our users with something they can’t get for free. The work we’ve done with Sylviane and the Louvain team, for example, means the new edition includes well-researched materials to help learners become better writers – that’s providing something a) they need and b) isn’t easily available elsewhere.

One of the things that took me ages to figure out was that dictionaries are not books about words but books about language. That hit me about three years ago. So much of linguistic behaviour follows patterns and conventions, something that was articulated most clearly by John Sinclair. Most English language teaching dictionaries now include some of these elements. But there is always more we can do. In our new edition, for example, we have included a set of language awareness essays – written by experts in the field rather than lexicographers. We have Frank Boers on idioms, Rosamund Moon on metaphor and Michael Hoey introducing his concept of lexical priming. What we are trying to do is give the learners information on the systems in the language, a sense of how it works. There’s lots more we can say in dictionaries. Pragmatics for example. I don’t think we’ve really cracked how to include that in a way that helps learners.

Isn’t there a danger that dictionaries will just become bigger and bigger, with more and more features?
Michael Rundell: English language teaching (ELT) dictionary makers are all still using the Hornby model from 1948, one large universal monolingual dictionary for learners from all language groups and for all language needs. I think the ELT dictionary will gradually morph into something different, into a kind of collection of linguistic resources with learners accessing the resources that suit them. What we are talking about is a dictionary that is customised by the user rather than a one size-fits-all version. In our new edition we have used the CD-ROM to help learners choose what they need to know. They can look at a complete dictionary entry if they like, or they can look at a stripped down version and then choose, by clicking on buttons, to get any other information they need, like collocation for example, or inflections. We’re trying to reflect the way the Web has taught people to access information, to start from a simple entry and then broaden out or narrow down their search.

What kind of person makes a good lexicographer?
Michael Rundell: It’s not that different from what makes a good journalist really. You need to be able to analyse facts and then present them to users in a way that is relevant, straightforward and approachable. It’s the last bit that is the hardest – writing sharp definitions. The very best definitions combine economy and accuracy and some sort of punch – what mathematicians call elegance. None of us get it right all the time.

For an introduction to the new edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary, visit this page.

This interview, by Melanie Butler, was first published in the April 2007 edition of EL Gazette. MED Magazine would like to thank EL Gazette for permission to reprint the interview.