Patrick Hanks probably no longer needs any introduction to lexicographers and lexicologists, and especially not to readers of the International Journal of Lexicography. He has published at least one article or book review every year in IJL since 2004 and his regular contributions to Euralex conferences and to many other journals provide clear evidence that this prolific author cannot be ignored as soon as one discusses modern lexicography. This brief book review will not attempt to describe the multiple facets of Hanks's contributions to lexicography, lexical semantics, computational and corpus linguistics, and the study of word meaning in general. I encourage the reader to read Gilles-Maurice de Schryver's excellent introduction to the Festschrift he edited in honour of his friend on the occasion of his 70th birthday. De Schryver rightly points out that ‘Hanks is a linguistic theorist and empirical corpus analyst, also an onomastician, but above all he is a lexicographer’ (p.4). For linguists who, like me, have always taken a lot of pleasure in reading Hanks's papers on phraseology, on idioms, on metaphors, on word associations, on collocations and collocation extraction, on dictionary definitions, on corpus pattern analysis, on linguistic norms and exploitations, or on proper names, it may be too easy to forget that he is primarily a lexicographer, indeed, and that he has played a pivotal role in several major dictionaries of the English language, including the Collins Dictionary of the English language (1979), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) and the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998). Beyond these direct contributions to lexicography, it is safe to claim that if today's dictionaries, especially learners’ dictionaries, are better at presenting collocational material and phraseological data, it is largely due to the fact that, in 1989, Patrick Hanks showed us how to discover the most significant collocates in a seminal and influential paper he wrote with Ken Church (Church and Hanks 1989).