He spent one year as a volunteer in Kenya 1978–1979 then began studying at Cambridge University, graduating with a first class BA degree in philosophy and engineering in 1982.

In 1987, he left his job and started an MSc in intelligent knowledge-based systems at the University of Sussex, from where he graduated the following year, continuing a DPhil in computational linguistics with thesis Polysemy (1992).

After the diagnosis he started his own blog[7] where he reflected on his experience with the disease and thoughts on language, corpus linguistics and life, and the world in general.

[2] In 2003, he started his own company Lexical Computing Limited delivering tools and services in corpus processing.

The work on polysemy brought Kilgarriff to text corpora and corpus linguistics to which he devoted the rest of his career.