A team led by a Scottish lexicographer has started the first Irish-English dictionary for 45 years, writes Catherine Foley

It's easy to imagine the security guard at BBC Broadcasting House, in London, sizing up Sue Atkins, looking dubiously at the young Scottish lexicographer. She was holding an old carrier bag that was bursting at the seams with notes, ready to do a radio interview about the newly published Collins Robert English-French Dictionary, of which she was general editor.

Atkins recalls the incident with delight, smiling at the memory of the guard, who stopped her in her tracks and waited until he'd got clearance before he allowed her through the doors.

"I wrote the dictionary when I was baby-sitting other people's babies," she says. "My husband was a clergyman, so we had no money . . . . I hand-wrote the whole thing," she adds matter of factly.

The book, which came out in 1978, radically changed the way dictionaries were written. "I realised that it would be possible to write a dictionary that would be intelligent if you put in a few more bits of information," she says. "We made it possible to pick the correct word and use it correctly."

Today Atkins is an internationally recognised lexicographer. She gives masterclasses all over the world, in lexicography and lexical computing, and jets between the University of California at Berkeley and IBM in New York, discussing code-breaking programs and how to crack the secrets of language.

Atkins is currently working on a linguistic project at Berkeley that aims to "beat American English into submission, so you can ask the computer questions . . . . Managing language in a computer is one of the aims of every government." The project, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation, plans to "record as much of the language as possible in a format that allows the computer to answer certain questions".

Three Days Of The Condor, the 1975 film in which decoding languages left Robert Redford running for his life, comes to mind. "Absolutely," says Atkins with relish. "It's really exciting stuff. You can get really psyched up about it." She smiles with some embarrassment as she tries to hide her enthusiasm.

Atkins, who has had policemen from Interpol attend her masterclasses, wanting to learn how to use the intricacies of a computerised database to track down criminals, has now been contracted to take on the crucial first phase of work in creating a new English-Irish dictionary.

This is expected to take a total of five years to complete, at an estimated cost of almost €4 million. The last English-Irish dictionary was published in 1959.

Over the past eight months Atkins, who speaks no Irish, has worked with fellow lexicographers Michael Rundell and Adam Kilgarriff on the design of a framework for the dictionary, which will comprise approximately 50,000 headwords.

The three experts, who are partners in a Brighton-based company called The Lexicography MasterClass, have been fine-tuning computation support systems and preparing the templates that will be used when the full dictionary is being compiled, in the next phase of the project. They have also been preparing the software for the corpus - the body of books, articles and other texts that will be available in digital form in the second phase.

According to Atkins: "It is possible to build a corpus that contains tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of words." This huge database of language will be harnessed to state-of-the-art lexical profiling software, providing the project with linguistic tools that are faster and more advanced than those available to any other dictionary project.

"We are setting in place the mechanism that will allow the Irish lexicographers to come in and write their own dictionary," says Atkins, who is already working closely with a group of Irish-language scholars and linguists, with Prof Dónall Ó Baoill of Queen's University Belfast as chief Irish editor of the first phase.

The dictionary will be based on English as it is spoken in Ireland, but it will also contain standard forms of British and US English. Up to 25 million words of Hiberno-English - English as it is spoken in Ireland - will be put into the corpus. The corpus will also draw on existing resources for British and US English.

Atkins is fascinated by some of the phrases that are used only in Ireland. To put someone asleep, she says, is one she discovered while reading Nuala O'Faolain's autobiographical Are You Somebody? "We'd say: 'I put someone to sleep.' "

Atkins cites another example of Hiberno-English: "She linked her mother down the steps." "You'd never use the word link like that in British English."

The development of dictionaries is laid down as one of the statutory functions of Foras na Gaeilge, the State-sponsored organisation dedicated to promoting Irish. And there is a website, www.focloir.ie, to keep people up to date on the dictionary's progress.

What is the difference between running a risk and taking a risk, asks Atkins. "You can't say a baby took a risk of running a temperature," she says. "It's to do with what you do before the action." If the person involved in the risk initiates the action, then they take the risk, she explains, smiling at having solved another linguistic riddle.