On March 6, 2023, Annette Klosa-Kückelhaus (the president of EURALEX), Željko Jozić (Director of the Institute for the Croatian Language and Linguistics), and the EURALEX 2024 conference organiser Kristina Štrkalj Despot, signed the agreement to organize the XXI. EURALEX International Congress in Cavtat, Croatia, on 8–12 October 2024.
The A.S. Hornby Educational Trust is pleased to invite applications for the A.S. Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA 2022)
We support innovative research into areas of lexicography that reflect and extend the pioneering contributions of A.S. Hornby within the field of language education. Each year we fund original research that aims to produce clear practical benefits for learners of English.
Last year we were able to offer support to three projects, which shared the funding available for 2021:
- Dr Man Lai Amy Chi, Center for Language Education, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: Dictionary Literacy Training for EFL Teachers
- Ngan Chinh Nguyen Lee, School of Education, University of Adelaide, Australia: Piloting SemiMed – a mini semantic visualisation dictionary of semi-technical medical vocabulary
- Dr R. Vennela, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, Telangana, India: Developing Pilot Materials for an English -Telugu bilingual pedagogic dictionary and teacher resource book for low resource ESL contexts
This year we look forward to receiving further interesting and innovative proposals which link lexical research activities with the needs of language learners.
ASHDRA can offer funds of up to £15,000 in 2022 for research that leads to clear practical benefits for learners of English. Grants can be awarded to either a single project, or to smaller initiatives.
Deadline for applications is 19 April 2022.
If you are considering making an application, you can find more information on the Hornby Trust website.
https://www.hornby-trust.org.uk/projects#ASHDRADictionaryResearchAwards
Sue Atkins (1931-2021)

Sue Atkins warns lexicographers
With great sadness we announce that Sue Atkins died on Friday (3rd September), at the age of 90. She died peacefully at home, and her husband Peter and daughters Lucy and Jenny were with her at the end. Sue was a giant of our community — a founder member of Euralex, a member of the first Euralex Board, and later President of Euralex. She was also instrumental in training African lexicographers: her Afrilex-Salex workshops, which she ran in 1997 (Grahamstown) and 1998 (Pretoria) together with the equally untiring Michael Rundell, were such a great success that they later morphed into what we now know as the ‘Lexicom workshop in lexicography and lexical computing’ series. For many years at Lexicom, Sue and Michael were joined by that other visionary of our field, Adam Kilgarriff (1960-2015), hence the ‘lexical computing’ part. The other major outcome of Afrilex-Salex was the publication of ‘The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography’ (Atkins & Rundell 2008), which was based on the material used at the South African training courses.
I can think of no better way to remember Sue than by re-watching her last talk on lexicography, in conversation with Michael Rundell, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZck6jUP-Hw
All of us who work in the lexicographic field are very much in her debt, and she will be hugely missed.
Let us take a moment to remember her,
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
outgoing President of Euralex (2018-2021)
past President of Afrilex (2009-2013)
This afternoon, the president of EURALEX Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Mannheim’s academic director Prof. Dr. Henning Lobin (on the upper left in the screenshot), Mannheim’s administrative director Dr. Torben Heinze (on the lower right), and the EURALEX 2022 conference organiser Annette Klosa, signed the agreement to organize the XX. EURALEX International Congress in Mannheim on 12–16 July 2022. Unfortunately, Gilles-Maurice couldn’t be invited to come to Mannheim due to covid-19, so the meeting was virtual. Here is a link to the Youtube channel where the video presenting EURALEX 2022 at Mannheim is to be found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNHAEE4zGCQ
The Organizing Committee of the EURALEX XIX International Congress has decided to organize the Congress which was to be held in Alexandroupolis, Greece as a Virtual Congress on 7-11 September 2021. More information can be found on the conference website.
Once again the A.S. Hornby Educational Trust (ASHET) is pleased to announce a call for proposals under the A.S. Hornby Dictionary Research Awards initiative (ASHDRA).
Through this annual award scheme we aim to support innovative research into areas of lexicography that will feed into practical benefits for learners of English. The deadline for applications is 19 April 2021.
Details of the award scheme and how to apply can be found on the Hornby Trust website:
https://www.hornby-trust.org.uk/projects#ASHDRADictionaryResearchAwards
Michael Rundell, on behalf of the ASHDRA Expert Panel
Our dear colleague Tanneke Schoonheim, Secretary-Treasurer of EURALEX, passed away unexpectedly on 25 August 2020. Beautiful obituaries were written by Frieda Steurs, Director of the Dutch Language Institute, and Anne Dykstra, Organiser together with Tanneke of EURALEX 2010. Our thoughts go to all of Tanneke’s family, friends and colleagues.
The EURALEX Board
Memorial Service video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjQzvHyLVqk
The first volume of the EURALEX 2020 proceedings has been published, and can be found at https://euralex2020.gr/proceedings/.
The deadline for papers for the second volume is 28th March 2021.
After much consideration, the Organising Committee of Euralex 2020, in consultation with the Euralex Board, decided to reschedule the congress to 7-11 September 2021. ‘Euralex 2020’ will thus take place exactly one year after the original date. Our goal is to avoid disruptions to the original programme and to ensure that as many people as possible can accommodate the new date into their schedules. For all new deadlines, please see the congress website at https://euralex2020.gr/.
The XXth EURALEX International Congress will take place on 12-16 July 2022 in Mannheim, Germany. Please have a look at the video presentation and PDF we prepared for you (which replaces the presentation of Mannheim as the 2022 EURALEX congress venue, which would have been given as part of the EURALEX General Meeting in Alexandroupolis this year): https://euralex.org/conferences/.
We look forward to meeting all of you in Mannheim in 2022!
The Organizing Committee: Annette Klosa-Kückelhaus, Christine Möhrs, Petra Storjohann, and Stefan Engelberg – Leibniz-Institute for the German Language
(IDS) at Mannheim, Germany
The A.S Hornby Educational Trust (ASHET) is pleased to announce a call for research proposals under the A.S.Hornby Dictionary Research Awards scheme (ASHDRA).
The scheme will offer up to £10,000 annually to fund original research (into dictionaries and their use) that feeds into practical benefits for learners of English. Please draw this to the attention of anyone you think might be interested in applying.
Details can be found on the ASHET website http://www.hornby-trust.org.uk/newpage#Projects
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, the president of EURALEX, was recently interviewed for the Brazilian applied-linguistics journal Calidoscópio. You can download the full interview HERE.
On March 27 the Agreement stipulating the rights and responsibilities of EURALEX and Democritus University of Thrace, in connection with the organization of the 19th biennial international congress, was drawn up. This Agreement was signed by the President of EURALEX, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver; the Rector of the university, Alexandros Polychronidis; and the Organiser of the congress, Zoe Gavriilidou. The event will take place in the deluxe Ramadi Plaza hotel & convention centre in Alexandroupolis, Greece, from 8-12 September 2020. The signing event was accompanied by a press conference, which resulted in wide media coverage in the local newspapers, including a cover-story in the Observer of Thrace.
The sixth eLex conference Electronic lexicography in the 21st century (Smart Lexicography) was held in Sintra, Portugal, from 1-3 October 2019. The conference was hosted by University of Coimbra. More information can be found on the conference page.
The XVIII EURALEX International Congress was held 17-21 July 2018 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The Congress was organized by the Centre for Language Resources and Technologies at the University of Ljubljana and Trojina, Institute for Applied Slovene Studies.
The EURALEX Congresses bring together professional lexicographers, publishers, researchers, software developers and others interested in dictionaries of all types.
The motto of this edition of the EURALEX International Congress was: Lexicography in global contexts. [Link to conference page]
Congress Website: http://euralex2018.cjvt.si/.
The fifth eLex conference Electronic lexicography in the 21st century (Lexicography from Scratch) was held in Holiday Inn Leiden, Netherlands, from 19-21 September 2017. The meeting was hosted by INT (Institute of Dutch Language). [Link to conference page]
At the General Meeting held in September 2016 in connection with the Euralex conference in Tbilisi, the members adopted a resolution in which Euralex states its position and encourages bodies on international and national levels to acknowledge the status of lexicography as an academic discipline and promote the study of words and languages. [See the full resolution text]
Dear Colleagues
We are very pleased to announce that the web page for the Adam Kilgarriff Prize is now live at:
http://kilgarriff.co.uk/prize/
The Adam Kilgarriff Prize is intended to recognise outstanding work in the fields to which Adam contributed so much: corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and lexicography. It will be awarded biennially for an original publication, a piece of software, a product or service, or any combination of the above.
The first iteration of the Prize will be awarded in conjunction with the eLex conference taking place in Leiden, The Netherlands, in the autumn of 2017. The deadline for applications will be 30th September 2016, and the winner will be announced by 31st December 2016. Full details about the Prize and the application procedure can be found on the site.
Along with the other Trustees, I look forward to receiving your applications!
Michael Rundell (on behalf of the other Trustees: Miloš Jakubíček, Ilan Kernerman, Iztok Kosem, Pavel Rychlý, and Carole Tiberius)
The XVII EURALEX International Congress was held 6 – 10 September 2016 in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The Congress was organized by the Lexicographic Centre at Ivané Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.
The EURALEX Congresses bring together professional lexicographers, publishers, researchers, software developers and others interested in dictionaries of all types.
The motto of this edition of the EURALEX International Congress was: Lexicography and Linguistic Diversity.
Congress Website: http://euralex2016.tsu.ge.
Michael Rundell and Sue Atkins1
With the death of Tony Cowie towards the end of 2015, the lexicographic community has lost not only a distinguished and influential scholar, but an immensely popular and well-loved colleague. Tony was 84, and – though long retired from his position as Reader in Lexicography at the University of Leeds – he continued to work actively until ill health intervened. After an early career in English-language teaching and teacher-training, Tony shifted his focus to linguistics and lexicography. Working with A.S. Hornby in the early 1970s, he began his long association with English learner’s dictionaries, co-editing the Third Edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), and becoming its Chief Editor for the Fourth. He combined his role as working lexicographer with his teaching and research at Leeds, and he leaves an impressive body of work, notably in the field of phraseology. A founder-member of EURALEX, and an Honorary Member since 2004, Tony was also Editor of the International Journal of Lexicography from 1998 to 2003.
Tony Cowie was born in Yorkshire in 1931 and had a peripatetic childhood, as his father’s army regiment moved to various parts of what was then the British empire, before settling in the UK just before the start of World War Two. After the war, Tony studied Modern Languages at Oxford, and then took a postgraduate course in English Language Teaching. In 1956, he went to Nigeria as an English Language Officer, and taught at the Government Teacher Training College in Ibadan. In 1963, Tony and his young family moved to Edinburgh, where he took a postgraduate diploma at the School of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, studying under Ronald Mackin – with whom he later collaborated on two Oxford dictionaries of idioms. With a theoretical grounding in linguistics and practical experience as a language teacher and teacher-trainer, Tony was well qualified for his next role, at Leeds University’s School of English, where he became a temporary lecturer in English Language and General Linguistics (1966). This was the beginning of a long academic career at Leeds, where he worked until his retirement, becoming Reader in Lexicography in 1992.
For anyone with a professional or academic interest in monolingual learner’s dictionaries, Tony was the leader in the field, as both practitioner and thinker. His English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners (1999) was for many years the definitive survey of the subject, and it remains a classic. In the first part of the book, he describes the pioneering work of Harold Palmer, Michael West and A.S. Hornby. Like Tony himself, Palmer had started as an English teacher (in his case, in Japan) and then became a linguist as he sought to make sense of the language system and the language-learning process. Tony’s book records Palmer’s brilliant observation that “it is not so much the words of English nor the grammar of English that make English difficult, but that vague and undefined obstacle to progress…consists for the most part in the existence of so many odd comings-together-of-words” (our italics).
These “odd comings-together” were at the centre of Palmer and Hornby’s thinking about languages and how we learn them. Hornby worked as Palmer’s assistant at the Tokyo-based Institute for Research in English Teaching, and what later became the OALD began life in 1940 as The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary – the title reflecting the dictionary’s focus not so much on individual vocabulary items but on the way words combined to create meanings. A glance at Tony’s own extensive bibliography confirms that he followed directly in this line. Most of his early papers deal with syntax, collocation and idioms, as he explored practical ways of overcoming the difficulties these linguistic features posed for learners of English.
These issues were a central theme of the EURALEX Seminar on the Dictionary and the Language Learner, which Tony organised at Leeds in 1985. The conference proceedings, edited by Tony, were published in 1987 as The Dictionary and the Language Learner, and this helped to establish pedagogical lexicography as an important strand in dictionary research. In 1994, he hosted the first International Symposium on Phraseology at Leeds. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Tony ensured that the conference provided a comprehensive overview of phraseological scholarship by bringing in researchers from the vibrant eastern European tradition along with familiar faces such as John Sinclair, Rosamund Moon, and Igor Mel’cuk. A collection of papers from the conference (Phraseology: Theory, Analysis and Applications), co-edited by Tony and his Leeds colleague Peter Howarth, appeared a little later.
“Applications” is a key word here, because Tony applied his research interests as a working lexicographer, compiling (with Ronald Mackin and Isabel McCaig) two original, evidence-based dictionaries of phrasal verbs and phrasal idioms for OUP, and above all following Hornby at the helm of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Under Tony’s editorship, the OALD broke new ground, further developing Hornby’s description of the syntactic, collocational and phraseological features of complex English words. The Fourth Edition (1989), of which Tony was Chief Editor, was substantially larger than its predecessor, weighing in at almost 1600 pages, compared with just over 1000 pages in the Third (1974). As well as greatly expanding the dictionary’s coverage, OALD4 introduced a completely new system for describing a word’s syntactic behaviour. The complex, non-transparent inventory of 51 “Verb Patterns” (VP18a, VP6D, and so on) was replaced by a simpler, more pedagogically-appropriate notation, making this information more easily accessible to its intended users. With this and other innovations, the OALD maintained its position as the market-leading learner’s dictionary, even as new competitors entered the field.
Meanwhile, Tony continued to publish a series of insightful papers on phraseology, syntax, and just about every aspect of pedagogical lexicography, ending with a contribution on “Dictionaries, Language Learning and Phraseology” in the IJL’s Silver Jubilee issue of 2012. His last major work was as Editor of (and contributor to) the magisterial two volume Oxford History of English Lexicography (2009), a hugely important collection which included chapters on every facet of its subject.
Aside from his life as an academic, writer, and lexicographer, Tony had an extensive “hinterland”, his interests ranging from amateur dramatics (apparently encouraged by his parents’ one-time neighbour, the actor Peter Cushing) to cinema, music and art. Above all, he was a devoted husband and father. Those of us who attended the 1985 EURALEX Seminar at Leeds have fond memories of Tony’s young children apparently taking a leading role in the conference’s day-to-day organisation. Though a true polymath who has had a huge influence on our field, Tony was self-effacing and wore his learning lightly. He was always a delight to listen to and talk with at EURALEX Congresses and other events where lexicographers’ paths cross. We shall miss him enormously, and we send our thoughts and condolences to his wife Cabu and his six children.
1 We are grateful to Tony’s wife Cabu and son Nick for providing information about Tony’s life outside lexicography.