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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Winchester, Simon.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Richard Wakeman Collection of Tudor History (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Oxford English dictionary.

Murray, James A. H. (James Augustus Henry), 1837-1915.

Murray, James A. H.

History.

Veterans.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Veterans--Biography.

United States.

Psychiatric hospital patients--Great Britain--Biography.

Psychiatric hospital patients.

Great Britain.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries--History and criticism.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries.

New English dictionary on historical principles.

Lexicographers--Great Britain--Biography.

Lexicographers.

English language--Lexicography.

English language.

English language--Etymology.

Minor, William Chester.

Murray, James Augustus Henry, 1837-1915.

Minor, William Chester, 1834-1920.

Local Subjects:

Murray, James Augustus Henry, 1837-1915.

Minor, William Chester, 1834-1920.

Genre:

Biographies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Wakeman, Rollin (donor)

Physical Description:

xiii, 242 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Harperperennial edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : HarperPerennial, [1999].

Summary:

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents:

The dead of the night in Lambeth Marsh

The man who taught Latin to cattle

The madness of war

Gathering Earth's daughters

The big dictionary conceived

The scholar in cell block two

Entering the lists

Annulated, art, brick-tea, buckwheat

The meeting of minds

The unkindest cut

Then only the monuments.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [239]-242).

ISBN:

006099486X

9780060994860

9780060839789

0060839783

OCLC:

42373835