Patrick Hanks
British lexicographer (1940–2024)
Patrick Wyndham Hanks (24 March 1940 – 1 February 2024) was an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
Background
Hanks was educated at Ardingly College, University College, Oxford (BA, MA), and Masaryk University (PhD). After graduation from Oxford, he started his lexicographic career as editor of the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary (1971). In 1970, he was appointed editor of Collins English Dictionary (1979). From 1980 to 1983, he was director of the Names Research Unit of the University of Essex, England, where he began a PhD under the supervision of Yorick Wilks.
In 1983, he was appointed managing editor of COBUILD, and in 1987 he took on the additional role of chief editor of English dictionaries for Collins (now HarperCollins). In the summer of 1988 and 1989, he was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he co-authored with Ken Church influential papers on corpus-based statistical methods in lexical analysis.
Hanks died on 1 February 2024, at the age of 83.
Career
From 1990 to 2000, Hanks served as chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press (OUP).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14981932. VIAF identifies the subject as 64129694. The Library of Congress control number is n83198535. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2024, 1971 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patrick Hanks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.