Many other people have been involved with the project at both research and editing stages. Patrick Hanks, who was the Editorial Director of Cobuild throughout the project, made a valuable contribution both in policy and in detail. Dominic Bree, Jane Cullen, and Clare Ramsey worked as researchers in the early stages, and Ron Hardie helped from the beginning until quite late in the editing process. David Brazil gave us great help and encouragement during the early editing of the book. Without his support, this would have been a more difficult task. Helen Liebeck and Christina Rammell were influential in the early stages of editing. Michael Hoey. | The job of preparing the lists has been one of the most interesting and challenging problems in the preparation of this book. The computer does the first stage, and produces a fist by searching out all the words that fit a pattern it is given. For example, it might be asked to pick all the words that end in '-ing' and do not have a corresponding form without the '-ing'. The first list it produces includes such words as 'overweening', and 'pettifogging', which are not very common, and which in our view can be left to a later stage of language learning. Also found are 'blithering' and 'whopping', which have a special function and are treated in a separate paragraph . A few words fit the pattern well but are only found in very restricted combinations, or collocations. 'Piping' goes with 'voice', and 'gangling' goes with 'youth' or 'boy'. Since grammar mostly deals with generalities, we feel that it could be misleading to print them in fists which are intended to encourage composition.
