Christian Kay
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Professor Christian Kay |
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Professor Christian Kay in 2013
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| Born | April 4, 1940 |
| Died | May 28, 2016 (aged 76) Glasgow |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | MA, AM, DipGenLing, DLitt |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh, Mount Holyoke College, University of Glasgow |
| Occupation | Academic and lexicographer |
| Years active | 1964-2016 |
| Employer | University of Glasgow |
| Notable work | Historical Thesaurus of English, Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech, Scottish Language Dictionaries |
Christian Janet Kay (April 4, 1940 – May 28, 2016) was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), a project to which she dedicated 40 years (1969 to 2009).
Kay also founded the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech and published work on historical semantics and lexicography, and contributed metaphor and semantic annotation based projects on the Historical Thesaurus of English dataset.
Kay was educated at The Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh. She completed a MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, before continuing on to Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA.
After this Kay took on English language teaching in Sweden, as well as professional lexicography.
Kay first arrived at the University of Glasgow as a research assistant. At the age of 27, she became one of four co-editors and in 1979 she became a full-time lecturer in the English Language Department.
Of her career, Professor Kay is quoted as having said,
"I never intended to be an academic. I worked in journalism, English-language teaching and publishing before becoming a research assistant and then a lecturer at Glasgow. The common thread is an interest in language."
Recognised as an efficient and effective academic leader, and an ambitious, yet selfless scholar, over the course of her career, Kay had under her employ in 233 researchers and production staff.
In 1995 Kay and Jane Roberts published A Thesaurus of Old English, and in 1996 Kay was promoted from Senior Lecturer to Professor.
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