… in which we learn about how the Oxford English Dictionary was created with the help of an Oxford professor and an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane.
At first glance, this is simply the story of the writing of the English language’s most important reference book: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). However, in the hands of Simon Winchester, this seemingly dull story takes on a great deal of heart and life. The OED spans twelve volumes, defines 414,825 words, and contains 178 miles of text. As a point of comparison, the average fluent English speaker knows about 20,000 words.
From its inception to the completion of the first edition of the OED, 70 years elapsed, and in those seven decades a group of dedicated scholars ponderously worked their way through all the words in the English language. Their strategy was simple: read books, and write down every word they read. Since this is obviously a gargantuan task, they enlisted the help of interested volunteers in English-speaking countries around the world. In charge of the project was Professor James Murray, a man of humble origins who had attained his place at Oxford University through self-education (he never formally completed grammar school). Over time, he found that over ten thousand of the OED’s definitions were submitted by a single volunteer: one Dr. William Chester Minor, who apparently lived a mere forty miles from Oxford. Professor Murray took it upon himself to visit this prolific contributor to the dictionary, only to find that Dr. Minor was an American Civil War veteran who had murdered a man in London and was then found to be insane and was locked away for life in an insane asylum. What followed from this shocking discovery was a friendship and an extremely productive partnership that would last for the remainder of their lives.
