The Big Idea

It was born in 1857. Its two most prominent people were an Oxford professor and a Civil War Veteran. It took 70 years to complete, and when it was, it literally defined the English Language.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester, is the true story of how two men from vastly different backgrounds came together and, along with many others, put together the most important dictionary ever created.

The Professor

Born in February 1837, James Murray would grow up to become not the first or last editor of the OED's first edition, but he would be forever known as the most important.

Coming from the Scottish Borderland with an "unpromising, unmoneyed, unsophisticated" start at life, he very quickly proved himself to be an adept student, becoming a lecturer, joining all manner of philosophical societies,  eventually taking a professorship at Oxford.

Later, he would become the editor of the OED, and he fully took charge of the project, which at that point was nearly 20 years old. He instituted a full scale overhaul of procedures. The new plan: have volunteer readers carefully comb through books going back to the 1200's and pick out every interesting word, make precise notes as to the book and page, and cite the sentence the word appears in; then simply send them in. Every reader was given preprinted slips to fill out accordingly.

Murray and his staff would then go through all the slips, which eventually numbered in the millions, categorize them alphabetically, double check citations, write definitions based on the citations and common knowledge,  and send them to Murray himself, who would do the final edits on pronunciation and definitions.

The Madman

William Chester Minor was born in 1834 in the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to missionaries of the Congregationalist Church. There he lived until he was 14 when he was sent to live with relatives in New Haven, Connecticut. He graduated Yale in 1863 as a medical doctor.

He joined the Union Army, but after the horrors of war, he moved to London, England, when, in 1871, he shot a man to death. The British authorities diagnosed him with what today we would call paranoia and schizophrenia (most likely brought on by the war) and sentenced him to life at the Broadmoore Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

There he stayed (late in life he was allowed to go home to his brother in CT), a brilliant man with nothing to do...until the OED came along. He was allowed to work on the project, and for nearly 30 years, he combed his books and became one of the most prolific contributors to the work.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

Now we come the the final major character in Winchester's tale: the Dictionary itself. There have been dictionaries before; the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks. And there were earlier English dictionaries. But none of these earlier projects were bold enough to take on every single word --scientific and common, vulgar and sophisticated; every noun, verb (in all tenses), pronoun, article---- everything in the English language.

When all was said and done, the OED's first edition:

Defined 414,825 words
Had over 1.8 million quotations
One complete set (12 volumes) had 127 miles of paper, and over 200 million letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces, all hand set and letter-pressed.


Winchester's book, known in Britain as The Surgeon of Crowethorne, is a mere 242 pages long, but it is an epic tale which is gripping and well written. It is fascinating how two men with such different backgrounds and experiences would come together, and not only be colleagues from afar--Oxford was only about an hour away by train, but it would take Minor and Murray almost 20 years before they meet--but the close friendship they forge when they do finally meet.

Each chapter starts with the OED's complete entry for a word that describes the theme or events of the chapter. This is a very interesting device, and you learn some vocabulary along the way.

I had been eyeing this book for years, and I'm glad I finally took the time to read it. As William Safire said at the time it came out, "The linguistic detective story of the decade." Indeed it is.