Text

The professor and the madman: a tale of murder, insanity and the making of the oxford english dictionary

---

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics

---

Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

SS 423.092 WIN p

Publisher

New York : HarperCollins Publisher., 1998

Collation

xi, 242 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

61030228

Classification

423.092

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

United States
Great Britain
Psychiatric hospital patients
English language--Etymology
Lexicographers

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

Simon Winchester.

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment