I’m Gwyneth Fox. I’m the Dictionaries Publisher for Macmillan. That means that I am one of the people who decides which EFL dictionaries Macmillan will publish, and what they will look like. In fact, I am very much responsible for the final look of the dictionaries and the quality of the text. So I’m the person to blame if you find things you really don’t like!

My first degree was in English language and literature from the University of Edinburgh, but I’ve never really used the ‘literature’ part of it: I’ve been a teacher of the English language for the whole of my career. I’ve taught at different levels – everything from 3- year- olds at nursery through to university, where I’ve spent most of the past twenty-five years teaching and researching. My first job was teaching adults at an American language school in Rome, which I enjoyed very much: there can’t be many better places to start a career!

Although I’ve worked in the English department at the University of Birmingham from 1981 to 2003 and did quite a lot of teaching, until 1997 most of my time was taken up by working on the COBUILD project. The project was set up with two main aims: to use corpus data to find out how people are using English at the present time; and then to put the research findings into dictionaries, grammars, and other reference books for people learning English as a foreign or second language. I loved those early days. I couldn’t believe that I was actually paid to sit and look at words!

I’ve lived in Birmingham for more than 30 years now, and I can’t really imagine living permanently anywhere else. It’s a big city, not as dirty or industrial as it used to be; it’s vibrant; there’s a lot of good theatre and cinema; and it has the best concert venue in Europe, if not in the world. The Symphony Hall is renowned worldwide for its acoustics, its beauty, and the quality of music played there. You won’t be surprised to hear that most of my spare money is spent there! Birmingham isn’t beautiful, even I can’t claim that, but it is a good place to live.

Macmillan is in Oxford, a one and a quarter hour drive from Birmingham. I go once or twice a week, and enjoy the drive, listening either to classical music or to spoken texts. I've worked through a wonderful set of Proust, and have just embarked on an equally good version of Dante's Divine Comedy.

I enjoy my work. Dictionaries are really interesting books, full of fascinating information about the language. Our challenge is to make them accessible and easy to use. I'm very keen to get feedback on what we have done in the Macmillan Dictionaries series, and I'd like ideas on what we might do in the future. So please get in touch with me via this page or og G.Fox@macmillan.com. I promise I'll reply!