Sue Atkins has been a professional lexicographer since 1966, first with Collins Publishers (now HarperCollins), where she was General Editor of the first 'modern' English-French dictionary, the Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary, then as Lexicographic Adviser to Oxford University Press, where she pioneered methodology for the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data, ultimately resulting in the Oxford-Hachette English-French Dictionary. In 1987 Atkins met Charles J. Fillmore, whose Frame Semantics approach to the lexicon provided the solutions to many of her lexicographic problems. Their subsequent discussions and collaborations resulted in the development of the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley, to which Atkins became Lexicographic Adviser. Atkins was a member of the Advisory Board of the American National Corpus, and the International Journal of Lexicography. Among her most important contributions to corpus linguistics, Atkins originated the idea of the British National Corpus.