Obituary: Patrick Wyndham Hanks

Abstract

Though best known for his extensive and often transformative writings on lexicography and corpus linguistics, Patrick Hanks was also a career lexicographer with a strong track record of managing a string of groundbreaking dictionaries. His experience at the lexicographic coalface led him to question dictionary conventions, especially when the corpus data seemed to be at odds with traditional approaches to identifying and explaining meanings. His ideas about meaning potentials, his focus on ‘the probable not the possible’, and his Theory of Norms and Exploitations all arose directly from the experience of analysing corpus data in order to describe how words behave and combine. He was involved in almost every major development in our field over the last 50 years, and his influence will continue to be felt for as long as people are analysing language and making dictionaries.