Also attested as J. Granger. First recorded Oxford, 2011. Frequency band: rising.
Oxford, UK h.granger@example.com +44 555 0193 example.com/hgranger
I write and edit dictionary entries, mostly for historical English. Over 14 years I have drafted or revised around 9,200 entries and led corpus work covering 480 million words. I keep a private list of words that should exist and do not; it is currently 61 items long.
Cloveridge English Dictionary, Oxford
- Revised 3,100 entries in the letter ranges M–P, cutting average revision time from 11 to 7 days.
- Lead a team of 6 assistant editors; entry rejection rate at final review fell from 18% to 6%.
- Designed the antedating workflow now used across all 4 editorial desks.
She antedated 'mudlark' by forty years before her second cup of tea.
Wexford Language Data Ltd, Cambridge
- Built and cleaned a 480-million-word corpus of 18th-century periodicals with a team of 3.
- Wrote collocation-extraction scripts that surfaced 1,400 candidate senses per quarter for editors.
The corpus said 'nice' meant 'precise'; the editors sighed and agreed.
Pellworth Reference, Oxford
- Drafted 2,400 new-word entries; 78% passed first review without structural changes.
- Ran the reading programme: 210 volunteer readers, roughly 5,000 citation slips per month.
Filed under 'draft additions, March 2014', where all new words go to wait.
< granger, Old English lang 'long', apt for someone who reads long entries slowly; formed on B.A. English Language, University of Wexbridge (2008), + M.Phil. Historical Linguistics, Ashcombe College, Oxford (2010), thesis on semantic narrowing in trade vocabulary, 1650–1800. Cognate with a diploma in corpus methods (2016).
granger-edited, adj. XML entry markup (TEI), citation databases, Python for corpus queries.
granger-read, adj. Latin (good), French (good), German (reading), Middle English (fluent, unhelpfully).
granger-cited, n. 'Dating the Undatable: Periodical Evidence in Entry Revision', Journal of Reference Practice 12 (2022), 44–61.
granger-spoken, n. Talks at 5 lexicography conferences, 2017–2025, including one on the word 'nice' that ran 9 minutes over.
Commonly found near large card files and cold tea. References supplied on request. Not to be confused with Lang, Beatrix, a different person entirely.