Erin McKean

Erin McKean has wanted to be a lexicographer since she was
eight years old. After reading an article in the newspaper
about the publishing of the supplement to the Oxford
English Dictionary, she realized that making dictionaries
would be a cool job. (Luckily, she still feels that way.)
Erin has a BA and an MA in Linguistics from the University
of Chicago, where she wrote her master's thesis on the
treatment of phrasal verbs in children's dictionaries.
(Phrasal verbs are verbs like "act up", "kick out",
and "look (something) up".) While at the University of
Chicago, she worked as a volunteer at the Chicago Assyrian
Dictionary. Before OUP, Erin spent eight years at Scott
Foresman, where she worked on the Thorndike Barnhart
children's dictionaries. Erin is a member of the American
Dialect Society, the American Names Society, and Euralex
and is a member of the board of the Dictionary Society of
North America. Her publications include two papers in
Dictionaries, the journal of the DSNA. She is a computer
enthusiast and has given several presentations on SGML and
XML to Chicago Webgrrls. When not writing dictionaries or
editing VERBATIM she likes to sew completely impractical
clothes from vintage patterns and haunt used bookstores for
copies of Kathleen Norris and E. Phillips Oppenheim novels.
Erin lives in Chicago with her husband and young son.