FROM THE EDITOR
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FEATURE
Football games

World Cup competition
Enter our football competition
to win an iPod!

COLUMNS

Language interference
Halo Bos!
English borrowings in Indonesian

British and American
culture
 
NEW!
Where does the English
language come from?

New word of the month
A new word is born:
How do new words
make it into dictionaries?

MED Web Watch NEW!
Dictionaroake –
the singing dictionary
www.dictionaraoke.org

Contributors

Ivana Amerl

A Croatian Canadian, I finished my BA in French and Spanish, then later my MA in Latin American literature, only to end up in Indonesia as the Academic Coordinator of an English language school. Always one to take on a new challenge, while in Indonesia I started an NGO, and recently I helped in the rebirth of a Canadian ski resort: www.skifortress.ca. I am now living in Croatia with my Indonesian husband. Language acquisition is more than an academic subject for me, it's a way of life!

My work presently consists of freelance translating, research and writing short stories. I am an avid skier and hiker and love to travel any chance I get.

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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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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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Meet the Editor
Kati Sule

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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  Cover photographs courtesy of Alamy (British and American Culture),
Corbis (feature) and Verve Autograph Series (language interference)
Cover design by Mairi MacDonald