By Professor Richard Coates, Bristol Centre for Linguistics
Patrick Hanks was Visiting Professor in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics from 2016 until his death on 1 February 2024 at the age of 83. He was a scholar acknowledged by his peers as a true world leader in lexicography and corpus linguistics, as a theoretician of vocabulary, and in the design of huge projects dealing computationally with linguistic material.
I met him for the first time at a conference in Bristol in 2006, accompanied by a firework display on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was put on to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Brunel’s birth, but turned out to be a useful omen for what was to follow in my life. He told me about his plan for a new historical dictionary explaining the origins of British and Irish surnames. Such a dictionary already existed, but the data it was based on were collected half a century or more before, and it didn’t match up to Patrick’s embryonic idea. That was because it was really a dictionary of medieval surnames, some of which had died out, many others, as we now know, had been explained wrongly, and many did not feature in it. Patrick’s vision was to create a database founded on this ancient material and to add vast amounts of data from more modern records, so that the new dictionary would be a dictionary of names that still existed, and whose history could be traced from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This was heady stuff. Nobody had tried to do this on such a grand scale before, if at all. I got very excited and proposed trying to get funding to run the project. At the time I was at the University of Sussex, but within a few weeks I had moved to take up a position at UWE, and the project was successfully planned to be at home in the newly founded Bristol Centre for Linguistics. To cut a long story short, funds eventually arrived, and the project ran for nearly seven years, resulting in the published 4-volume Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, whose copyright prestigiously rests with UWE. A lot of work towards a second edition is still going on behind the scenes, coordinated here, and what drives it is still Patrick.
The idea for this was typical of Patrick’s enormous breadth of vision. It rapidly expanded even further beyond the scope of the older dictionary to include surnames that had arrived in these islands by mass immigration since the 1880s. He harnessed leading experts in nearly all the languages represented in the surnames you can currently find here – not just English and Irish, but Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Turkish, Mandarin and Cantonese, Yoruba, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic …. He knew what he wanted; he knew who to recruit to bring the product to the standard he craved and expected, and how to sweet-talk them till they were onside.
This is where I knew him best, as a scholar of enormous vision and mastery of the technical methods needed to underpin his projects. Near the end of the surnames project, he asked me tentatively whether I would be interested in being involved with a dictionary of WORLD surnames. I drew the line there. My visions are a lot smaller! But that is really what his Dictionary of American Family Names is, the massive work whose second edition (OUP, 2022) he conceived and created with Simon Lenarčič and Peter McClure and a host of specialists, and with which he continued to be involved even as his health declined towards the end of his life.
It’s hard to sum Patrick up as a scholar without diminishing him. He could work on several big projects at once. He wasn’t only a surnames man, or even a dictionaries man, as he had famously been for a long time before I knew him. He also had a broad understanding of language in general, especially words and the way they are used, and his ideas in semantics and pragmatics have influenced mine. But then again he wasn’t only academically gifted – he was a man who could network like a spider and lure anyone that he thought should have half an interest into his schemes. He could collaborate with many people and, being an exacting team leader, he could eat a few as well. He could do what he did because of his massive and enviable self-confidence, the high standards he expected from and drew out of others, and the personal charm that was never very far from the surface. He has been a hugely significant player in my life and in the history of BCL and UWE, and like so many others I’ll miss his physical presence greatly. His spirit, at least in part, will still energize BCL, and BCL is privileged to have hosted him.
UWELingo 