Michael Rundell

Michael Rundell

Michael Rundell has been a professional lexicographer since 1980. He has managed numerous dictionary projects, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan range of learner’s dictionaries. He has been involved in the development of several corpora (including the BNC) and has been at the forefront of applying computational techniques to the analysis of corpus data and the compilation of dictionary text. He has published widely in the field of corpus-based lexicography, and is co-author (with Sue Atkins) of the Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (2008). Michael is also well-known as a lecturer and trainer, and (with his Lexicography MasterClass colleagues) has taught degree courses and intensive workshops in lexicography and lexical computing. He is a founder member of EURALEX, ,and was a member of its Executive Board from 2006-2010.

Michael Rundell’s career is bookended by two major revolutions in lexicography: the arrival of corpora, and the transfer of reference resources from print to digital media. With the second of these revolutions still in its early stages, he finds himself on a new learning curve, as the nature of the dictionary business undergoes another transformation.

Dictionaries and Lexicons

Michael worked on the COBUILD project in the early 1980s, before becoming Managing Editor of dictionaries at Longman, where he was responsible for running major projects. He edited two editions of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2nd edition 1987, 3rd edition 1995) and the original edition of the Longman Language Activator (1993). In the late 1990s he began working with Macmillan to develop a new range of learner’s dictionaries, which included the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (or MEDAL, 1st edition 2002, 2nd edition 2007), and he is still Editor-in-Chief of Macmillan Dictionaries. The first dictionary of its type to be created from scratch for almost 10 years, MEDAL won both the Duke of Edinburgh/English Speaking Union English Language Book Award (2002) and a British Council Innovation Award (2004). It is now best known in its online edition, which also features a regular blog and an ‘Open Dictionary‘ for entries contributed by users.  With Sue Atkins, Michael was Editorial Director of the project which created the Dante lexical database (2007-2010).

Conference papers

Michael has given papers at numerous conferences (see publications), including most of the EURALEX Congresses. He has also been an invited keynote speaker at several events, including:

  • First International Symposium on Lexicography and L2 Learning and Teaching, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China, November 2008 (opening keynote)
  • First eLexicography in the 21st century conference, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, November 2009 (opening keynote)
  • Second eLexicography in the 21st century conference, Bled, Slovenia, November 2011.

He has been invited to give the Hornby Lecture at the EURALEX Congress in Oslo in August 2012.