B. T. S. Atkins

Who is B. T. S. Atkins?

Beryl T. Atkins has been a professional lexicographer since 1966, first with Collins Publishers, where she was General Editor of the first 'modern' English-French dictionary, the Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary, then as Lexicographic Adviser to Oxford University Press, where she pioneered methodology for the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data, ultimately resulting in the Oxford-Hachette English-French Dictionary. Among her most important contributions to corpus linguistics, Sue Atkins originated the idea of the British National Corpus.

She was educated at James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh and graduated from Edinburgh University in 1952 with a first class honours degree in French with Spanish.

Among her honors, are an honorary DLitt by the University of Brighton, UK, for services to lexicography and linguistics; a festschrift published by EURALEX to mark her contribution to international lexicography, and an honorary DLitt by the University of Pretoria for significant contributions to the development of lexicographic practices worldwide and in particular for the African languages in South Africa. She is also Past President and Honorary Life Member of the European Association for Lexicography.