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in his work on WSD evaluation and in his work on building and comparing corpora. His signature company slogan was '

corpora for all'

. This paper has come together from a small sample of the very large pool of Adam'

s collaborators. The sections have been written by different subsets of the authors and with different perspectives on Adam'

s work and on his ideas. We hope that this approach will give the reader an overview of some of Adam'

s main scienti?c contributions to both academia and the commercial world, while not detracting too greatly from the coherence of the article. The article is structured as follows. Section

2 outlines Adam'

s thesis and origins of his thoughts on word senses and lexicography. Section

3 continues with his subsequent work on WSD evaluation in the Senseval series as well as discussing his qualms about the adoption of dictionary senses in computational linguistics as an act of faith without a speci?c purpose in mind. Section

4 summarizes his early work on using corpus data to provide word pro?les in a project known as the WASP-bench, the precursor to his company'

s3 commercial software, the Sketch Engine. Corpus data lay at the very heart of these word pro?les, and indeed just about all of Computational Linguistics from the mid 90s on. Section

5 discuss Adam'

s ideas for building and comparing corpus data, while section

6 describes the Sketch Engine itself. Finally section

7 details some of the impact Adam has had transferring ideas from computational and corpus linguistics to the ?eld of lexicography.

2 Like Oxford, the University of Sussex, where Adam undertook his doctoral training, uses DPhil rather than PhD as the abbreviation for its doctoral degrees.

3 The company he founded is Lexical Computing Ltd. He was also a partner C with Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell C in another company, Lexicography MasterClass, which provides con- sultancy and training and runs the Lexicom workshops in lexicography and lexical comput- ing;

http://www.lexmasterclass.com/.

2 Adam'

s Doctoral Research To lay the foundation for an understanding of Adam'

s contribution to our ?eld, an ob- vious place to start is his DPhil thesis [19]. But let us ?rst sketch out the background in which he undertook his doctoral research. Having obtained ?rst class honours in Philsophy and Engineering at Cambridge in 1982, Adam had spent a few years away from academia before arriving at Sussex in

1987 to undertake the Masters in Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems, a programme which aimed to give non-computer scientists a grounding in Cognitive Science and Arti?cial Intelligence. This course introduced him to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and lexical semantics, and in

1988 he enrolled on the DPhil program, supervised by Gerald Gazdar and Roger Evans. At that time, NLP had moved away from its roots in Arti?cial Intelligence towards more formal approaches, with increasing interest in formal lexical issues and more elaborate models of lexical structure, such as Copestake'

s LKB [6] and Evans &

Gazdar'

s DATR [9]. In addition, the idea of improving lexical coverage by exploiting digitized versions of dictionaries was gaining currency, although the advent of large-scale corpus-based ap- proaches was still some way off. In this context, Adam set out to explore Polysemy, or as he put it himself: What does it mean to say a word has several meanings? On what grounds do lexicographers make their judgments about the number of meanings a word has? How do the senses a dictionary lists relate to the full range of ways a word might get used? How might NLP systems deal with multiple meanings? [19, p. i] Two further quotes from Adam'