Christian Kay

Christian Janet Kay (4 April 1940 – 28 May 2016) was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), a project to which she dedicated 40 years (1969 to 2009).

Kay also founded the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech and published work on historical semantics and lexicography, and contributed metaphor and semantic annotation based projects on the Historical Thesaurus of English dataset.

Of her career, Professor Kay is quoted as having said,"I never intended to be an academic. I worked in journalism, English-language teaching and publishing before becoming a research assistant and then a lecturer at Glasgow. The common thread is an interest in language." Recognised as an academic leader, and a scholar, over the course of her career, Kay had under her employ in 233 researchers and production staff.

In 1995 Kay and Jane Roberts published A Thesaurus of Old English, and in 1996 Kay was promoted from Senior Lecturer to Professor.

Retiring in 2005, Kay remained active in the facilitation and research in Thesaurus-derived projects.

Kay is credited to have created the first computer laboratory for English studies in the world, developing cutting-edge teaching software, and first of its kind research-led courses in literary and linguistic computing. Randolph Quirk, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London reported,"Forty five years of exacting scholarship by a well-led team have had a triumphal outcome. This book is a magnificent achievement of quite extraordinary value. It is perhaps the single most significant tool ever devised for investigating semantic, social, and intellectual history." An overwhelming success, the HTOED has generated significant royalties allowing for a legacy of funding for postgraduate studentships continuing research into the linguistics of English and of Scots.

The Christian Kay Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Undergraduate Research into Modern English Language and Linguistics was set up in her memory at the University of Glasgow.

Publications Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy. 1995. A Thesaurus of Old English. (=King's College London Medieval Studies XI.) Second edition, 2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kay, Christian. 2000. `Historical semantics and historical lexicography: will the twain ever meet?', in Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography in English Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Fourth G.L. Brook Symposium, ed. by Julie Coleman and Christian Kay. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 53-68. Kay, Christian J. and Irené A. W. Wotherspoon. 2002. `Turning the dictionary inside out: some issues in the compilation of a historical thesaurus', in A Changing World of Words: Studies in English historical semantics and lexis, ed. by Javier E. Diaz Vera. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 109-135. O'Hare, Cerwyss. 2004. `Folk Classification in the HTE Plants Category', in Kay and Smith, eds, 179-191. in Categorization in the History of English, ed. by Christian Kay and Jeremy Smith. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 59-69. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, Irené Wotherspoon, and Marc Alexander (eds.). 2017. The Historical Thesaurus of English, version 4.22. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/thesaurus/.