The Editors of the HTOED

Christian Kay MA, AM, DipGenLing Christian Kay was educated at the University of Edinburgh and Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. In 1969 she joined the Historical Thesaurus of English as a research assistant, becoming director of the project in 1989. She is currently an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at Glasgow University. Her publications include (with Jane Roberts) A Thesaurus of Old English. She founded the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) and is a member of the team producing its successor, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing.

Jane Roberts MA, DPhil, DLitt Jane Roberts was educated at the universities of Dublin and Oxford. As a lecturer at Glasgow University, she began preparing Old English materials for the Historical Thesaurus project. She is currently Emeritus Professor, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, at the University of London. She is joint author with Christian Kay of A Thesaurus of Old English. Her main interest is in the history of the English language, especially lexical semantics and medieval vernacular manuscripts.

Michael Samuels MA, DLitt, FRSE Michael Samuels studied Classics and English at Balliol College, Oxford. After becoming a lecturer in English Language at Edinburgh University, he collaborated with Angus McIntosh in work which led to A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. In 1959 he was appointed Professor of English Language at Glasgow University, where his main interests have been in linguistic change, especially verbal obsolescence and replacement. In order to further such studies, in 1964 he established the Historical Thesaurus as a departmental project.

Irené Wotherspoon MA, MLitt Irené Wotherspoon was educated at Glasgow University. Her postgraduate thesis (1969) experimented with using OED material to construct a partial historical thesaurus based on analysis of theories of classification. She later became a Research Assistant on the Historical Thesaurus project. Her responsibilities included collaborating with technical staff in resolving issues raised by development of the electronic thesaurus database. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Glasgow. She has published papers and co-edited volumes of papers on historical linguistics.