Live Facebook Q&A with editor-in-chief Michael Rundell

Our announcement at the end of last year, that we’ll no longer be printing dictionaries in favour of our online dictionary, generated a lot of conversation and speculation in the national and international press. Many of you celebrated our move from print to online, though some shared concerns about leaving the era of print behind.

Going digital means that our dictionary will be available to everyone, everywhere, and at any time. Unlike print dictionaries, our online dictionary will be updated frequently, making it the perfect medium for an ever-evolving product.

Going digital also means that we can keep in touch with you more easily: share ideas and address your questions via the blog and social media.

For these reasons we have decided to hold a live Question & Answer session on our What’s your English? Facebook page. Our Editor-in-Chief Michael Rundell will be answering your questions between 1pm and 4pm GMT on Wednesday 30th January.

If you have any questions, but are unable to get involved on Wednesday, please leave your questions on the What’s your English? wall and Michael will endeavour to answer them during the live session.

This Q&A session is intended to answer questions about our move from print to digital, and to discuss its implications. But if you have any other questions about our dictionary or blog, Michael will be happy to answer these too.

Michael’s Q&A will be live on Facebook and the highlights will also be summarised on Twitter via @MacLiveEnglish.

Michael looks forward to chatting with you!

About Michael Rundell
Michael has been working in dictionaries for over 30 years. He was around during the ‘corpus revolution’ of the 1980s, when they first started using corpus data as a basis for describing language. Michael’s seen plenty of changes and upheavals in the intervening years, but the biggest change during his career is the one that’s going on now, as dictionaries migrate from printed books to digital media of various kinds.

As well as editing dictionaries, Michael runs regular training courses in lexicography and lexical computing, and he is the co-author of The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (2008). Michael believes that this is an unpredictable but exciting time for the dictionary business. “We genuinely don’t know how things will look five years from now, but we can be sure that social media will play an important part.”