Lexicographer who demystified surnames, chronicled rude words and edited Collins dictionaries
PATRICK HANKS, who has died aged 83, was a lexicographer, corpus linguist and onomastician, one who studies names; he edited the Collins English Dictionary (1979), shed light on the meaning of surnames on both sides of the Atlantic, and unearthed the history of rude words.
Hanks, a genial figure with the build of a rugby forward, discovered that the surname Daft, popular in Leicester, originally meant submissive, humble or gentle; that someone named Barrett might be a fraud; a Mallory was considered unlucky; and a Purcell was a little pig. He thought that Shakespeare was “probably an obscene name, originally for a masturbator”, but was stumped by the etymology of Nimmo in Scotland and Clutterbuck in Gloucestershire.
While most Bastards have changed their name over the centuries, a whole category remains of appellations given to children abandoned to orphanages. These include the French surname Jette (meaning “thrown out”), the Italian Esposito (“exposed”) and the English Parrish, someone who was raised at the expense of the community.
Hanks enjoyed the ever-changing meaning of language. “Nice”, for instance, has historically meant both “wanton” and “abandoned”. Slang is a particuarly fast-moving area. To the Collins Concise Dictionary (1988) he added “bonked” and “toyboy”, but found insufficient evidence to warrant the inclusion of “bimbo”.
That dictionary was criticised by The Daily Telegraph for embracing“the often invigorating verbal innovation so four American and Antipodean cousins”. Among the least desirable words were “anklebiter” (child) from Australia and “hooker” (prostitute) from America which, the paper added, “should still suggest first and foremost to English minds a position in the game of rugby”.
With a nod to Samuel Johnson, Hanks responded that “the harmless drudges” who compile dictionaries do not legislate on which words should become part of the language; that is something determined by its users. “The reporting of modern words and modern meanings in a dictionary does not ‘sanction’ them, any more than a report of a violent killing in your pages ‘sanctions’ the act of murder,” he responded.
He offered the cautionary tale of the 1950s dictionary editor who refused to include a “a piece of slangy journalese” that would “not even last until the dictionary is published”. That word was “brainwashed”.
Hanks was alarmed to discover how promiscuous the prefix “euro” had become, noting that it was cosying up to words where it had no business at all. One amusing misuse was in the Journal of Gut Biology. “The correct word was urogenic, which means generating urine,” he said. “They had just written ‘eurogenic’.”
Patrick Wyndham Hanks was born in Worcester on March 24 1940, the son of Wyndham Hanks and Elizabeth (née Rudd). He was educated at Ardingly College, West Sussex, and read English at University College, Oxford.
His editing career began on the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary (1971), a work that according to this paper was “notable for its comprehensiveness, the simplicity of its definitions and its remarkable cheapness [£4.95; equivalent to £59 today]”. He spent much of the next decade working on the Collins English Dictionary.
He knew his work was worthwhile when the characters of Coronation Street began discussing the exact meaning of “condoned”. To his delight, they concluded that a new dictionary was needed.
In 1980 Hanks was appointed director of the Names Research Unit at the University of Essex. He then joined a joint venture between the University of Birmingham and Collins, using computational linguistic techniques to create the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987) that uses context to help define words.
His other work included A Dictionary of First Names (with Flavia Hodges, OUP, 1990), which explores the origins of 7,000 names from Aaltje to Zygmunt, though he was disturbed by the fashion for non-traditional names such as Blagnat, Flint or Kylie.
“This is part of the decline of traditional values of church and state,” he declared when Tom, Dick and Harry were joined by Thessaly, Dove and Heaven in the second edition in 1997.
His three-volume Dictionary of American Family Names was published in 2003.
Hanks was twice married: to Helga Lietz in 1961 and Julie Eyre in 1979. Both marriages were dissolved. He had a son and a daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.