Patrick Wyndham Hanks

I came to know about Prof. Patrick Wyndham Hanks due to my interest in the study of onomastics. I met him during an annual meeting of linguistic associations at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston, the US, in January 2004.

I had been invited by Edwin D. Lawson from the State University of New York, Fredonia, to deliver a talk at the conference, which was organised by the American Name Society.

During the week-long event, a book fair was held and several participants – among them Hanks – were taking part with their publications. Among these books there was the recently published three-volume Dictionary of American Family Names (Oxford University Press, 2003), edited by Hanks. I was interested in buying this dictionary and asked Hanks to sell me a copy.

“Joe,” he answered me with a characteristic smile on his face, “all you have to do is wait. Books that are not sold during the book fair are then offered at half price.”

And that is what I did. I got the voluminous dictionary, which he gladly signed for me, for half the original price.

The autographed dictionary together with the personal conference tag of Hanks are today proudly in the possession of a friend of mine.

After that, we must have met some time later and he gladly posed for a photo before we departed at the end of the general meeting.

Hanks was born in Worcester, England, on March 24, 1940. He was a well-known lexicographer, corpus linguist and onomastician; he edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names. Hanks was lately a visiting professor at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at the University of the West of England and in lexicography at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing in the University of Wolverhampton.

He was a beacon in the field of lexicography for many decades and edited the Collins English Dictionary (1979).

I do not know if he finished a new English grammar he was working on before he died.

During his last years, the giant of linguistics was battling with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. However, he died from COVID-19 on February 1, 2024, at the age of 83.

His passing away leaves a great loss in the study of linguistics. Hanks has left a legacy which will continue to influence lexicography and onomastics for many years to come, inspiring research into the fascinating world of words and names.

Rest in peace, dear Patrick.

Joe Zammit Ciantar