James Gregory - Dictionary of Lexicography

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to the very many people who have helped us along our way in the compilation of this dictionary.

The University of Exeter and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology provided congenial environments within which we were able to work. We benefited greatly from the study leave granted to RRKH, which allowed him an extended period in Hong Kong, sponsored by the British Council and by the Language Centre at HKUST, where we were able to work together face to face. We are extremely fortunate to have had excellent office back-up both at Exeter and HKUST. We should like to thank Cathy Pantry for secretarial assistance at the Dictionary Research Centre at Exeter; and at the Language Centre, HKUST, Ada Fan Shui-fun for secretarial assistance, Candice Poon Wai-yi for executive assistance, and Forward Hui Kam-chun and Terence Chow Chi-wai for technical assistance.

Our professional colleagues have helped us in a variety of ways, and we should like to record our appreciation especially to: (at Exeter) Steven McGill for the database design and transfer, Alan Wakelam for the initial design of the panels, Trevor Learmouth for assistance with library matters and entries, John Wilkins for references for Classics; (at HKUST) John Milton for assistance with computer matters and entries, and the staff of the University Library for general helpfulness.

We should like to thank the postgraduate students at Exeter, especially the 19945 cohort, who helped us in our initial item search; in particular Martin Stark made a great contribution to our wordlist by his very thorough sifting of available sources. Li Lan and her fellow doctoral students helped us greatly in our search for references.

We are grateful to colleagues far and wide for their willingness to answer our queries: especially A. D. de V.Cluver on terminology, Edward Gates on the DSNA, Andrew Taylor on textbooks; others commented very substantially on our text, in particular Adelia Carstens, Amy Chi Man-lai, Turki Diab, Tom McArthur and Daan Prinsloo. We ought to mention, too, the anonymous reviewers of our first draft: their constructive observations on our entries were extremely helpful to us.

We have drawn upon the ideas of many colleagues, both from their published work and from informal personal contacts; we should like to thank, in this regard, Henning Bergenholtz, Rufus Gouws, Colin Yallop and Jacques van Keymeulen, as well as several Visiting Scholars at Exeter.

We appreciate very much the assistance of Rosalind Fergusson, our perspicacious copy-editor, who made significant contributions to the final form of the text. Our editors at Routledge deserve our thanks too, for their care and attention to our work. We should like to thank the many publishers who responded to our requests for catalogues and other information; and the colleagues and students who answered our initial questionnaire, which persuaded us to see our proposed project to fruition.

We hope that all those who made contributions, large and small, to the final product will be for-giving of our sins of commission and omission, for which we alone remain responsible.

Finally, we should like to thank our families for putting up with our prolonged hibernation in our offices, and general absent-mindedness at home while entries were germinating in our heads.

R.R.K.Hartmann Exeter Gregory James Kowloon