B. T. S. Atkins

Beryl T. (Sue) Atkins is a lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.

Sue Atkins has been a professional lexicographer since 1966, first with Collins Publishers (now HarperCollins), 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. She was also Lexicographic Adviser to the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California, and a member of the Advisory Board of the American National Corpus, and the International Journal of Lexicography. Among her most important contributions to corpus linguistics, Sue Atkins originated the idea of the British National Corpus.. In 2010, Sue Atkins founded the Lexicography MasterClass in partnership with Adam Kilgarriff and Michael Rundell, providing advice, consultancy services, and training for anyone involved in, or embarking on, a lexicographic project. Now retired, Sue Atkins has taught and consulted in lexicography, and participated in national and international research projects in the field of computational lexicography, and originated the idea of the British National Corpus.

Her principal interests include the lexical analysis of corpus data, and in particular the use of linguistic theory as a basis for a systematic description of the language; designing databases to store lexicographic data for use by human lexicographers and computer lexicons; using such databases in the creation of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries; the training of lexicographers; and the study of how people actually use dictionaries.

Sue Atkins 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.. She lives in Sussex with her husband, Peter Atkins, and has three children, Paul, Jenny and Lucy. Her youngest daughter is the novelist Lucy Atkins. John McHardy Sinclair was her brother.

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