Dr Richard Aflsopp, a native of Guyana, is Director of the Caribbean Lexicography Project and former Reader in English Language and Linguistics, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. He edited the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. | CONTRIBUTORS Dr Richard Allsopp a native of Guyana is Director of the Caribbean Lexicography Project and former Reader in English Language and Linguistics University of the West Indies Cave Hill Barbados. He edited the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Dr Dianne Bardsley is Manager of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre at Victoria University of Wellington. Her PhD involved the compilation and analysis of a rural New Zealand English lexicon from the years 1842-2002. She was contributing editor for the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary and is currently leading several New Zealand lexicography research projects. James Lambert has worked primarily in Australian English specialising in slang in general and Australian slang in particular. He was assistant editor of The Macquarie Dictionary of New Words and general editor of The Macquarie Book of Slang and The Macquarie Slang Dictionary. John Loftus manages the online archive at . He was a senior research assistant on A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Lewis Poteet is a leading Canadian authority on slang and dialect. He has written extensively about language in Canada s maritime provinces and edited Car Motorcycle Slang Hockey Talk Plane Talk Car Talk and Cop Talk. John Williams served as a consulting lexicographer on this project. He has been contributing to general language dictionaries both monolingual and bilingual for more than 20 years. He is the author of three children s dictionaries as well as several articles on the practice of lexicography. PREFACE Eric Partridge made a deep and enduring contribution to the study and understanding of slang. In the eight editions of The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English published between 1937 and 1984 Partridge recorded and defined the slang and unconventional English of Great Britain and to a lesser extent her dominions from the 1600s to the 1970s. For the years up to 1890 Partridge was by his own admission quite reliant on Farmer and Henley s
