KAY, Christian Janet, DLitt, born Edinburgh 4 April 1940, died Glasgow 4 June 2016. Linguist, lexicographer, academic. Daughter of Dorothy Margaret Mack, and William Dewar Kay, both schoolteachers.

Christian Kay was educated at the Mary Erskine School, followed by study at the University of Edinburgh and Mount Holyoke College, USA. Although she never intended to become an academic, after various language-related posts, she arrived at Glasgow in 1969 as a research assistant, later moving to a lectureship and then a Chair in English Language (1996). Her field was the linguistics of English, specialising in the history of the language. A lifetime of research culminated in the widely acclaimed publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009): the world's largest thesaurus, and the most complete in English. This was a team effort, initiated by Michael Samuels. Having taken on leadership of the programme, Christian Kay found herself managing a large team of linguists, lexicographers and programmers. A pioneer in the study of ‘big data’, she harnessed information technology to handle the complex materials involved. In this role, she secured funding and employment for over 200 researchers and production staff for 40 years. The project's considerable royalties were assigned to postgraduate studentships.

Christian Kay's contribution to Scottish linguistic projects included being the first ever Convener of the Board of Scottish Language Dictionaries, and as such responsible for coordinating the Dictionary of the Scots Language, now the principal repository for the study of Scots words and their history. She was also the founder of the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech and worked after retirement on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. Regarded as an ‘awesomely effective’ academic leader, she was equally respected for her wit and humanity. Glasgow University awarded her a DLitt in 2013. JJSM

• Kay, C. (2009) (participation in Works as above); (2014) ‘English lexicographers and their achievements’, Historiographica Linguistica 41 (2—3), pp. 355—368. Caie, G. D. et al. (eds) (2006) The Power of Words: essays in lexicography, lexicology and semantics. In honour of Christian J. Kay; The Herald, 20 June 2016 (obit.).