Who We Are
Wordbox was founded by Patrick White. Most recently, Patrick was Director of learner dictionaries and grammar at Oxford University Press. In that role, he developed and implemented a strategy for this area with a focus on optimizing vocabulary resources, building language databases, and deriving B2C products from this data, notably apps and oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. He also oversaw the 9th and 10th editions of the market-leading Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and the 4th edition of Practical English Usage by Michael Swan, often referred to as the “Bible” for ELT professionals. For the last two years of his time at OUP, he was also Director of Content Management for the ELT Division, responsible for building and implementing a pedagogical framework for ELT coursebooks and assessment and introducing digitization to the content creation process.
Patrick’s first degree is in Linguistics. After graduating and teaching English in China, he worked for a translation company that specialized in patent translation. He fell into lexicography by chance and took up an in-house position at Larousse. After five years of managing French-English, German-English, Spanish-English and Portuguese-English dictionary projects, he moved to become Publishing Manager at Harrap, responsible for their entire bilingual output. This included the acclaimed Unabridged French-English English-French Dictionary of which he was Editor-in-Chief. In 2001 his remit expanded to cover the Chambers reference list and in 2006 he became Managing Director and Publisher of the company, having completed an MBA in that year.
Patrick’s languages are French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese. He is also very interested in the interplay of technology and language, having implemented XML workflow and worked in an XML environment for many years. He is a Qualified Member of the ITI, a Chartered Linguist and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.
