Book

The professor and the madman : a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary

Winchester, Simon author

1999

Overview

\"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.\"--Jacket

• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Subject: Murray, James A. H. 1837-1915 / Minor, William Chester / Oxford English dictionary / New English dictionary on historical principles / Psychiatric hospital patients Great Britain Biography. / Encyclopedias and dictionaries History and criticism. / Lexicographers Great Britain Biography. / English language Lexicography. / United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Veterans Biography
• ISBN: 006099486X, 9780060994860, 9780060839789, 0060839783, 9780060175962, 0060175966

Item info:

1 item available

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Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PE 1617 .O94 W562 1999	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE