The riveting tale of how the original Oxford English Dictionary was compiled. Believe me, it's a gripper! (–noun 1. a person or thing that grips. 2. grabbing you by the tender bits and keeping you focused).When I was at school, I remember my English tutor banging on about how the only newspaper worth reading was the Manchester Guardian. Simon Winchester, a journalist for that paper, writes this account of the process behind the first edition of the world-famous OED.
James Murray - the "professor" in the book's title - and his team started by advertising for contributions to what would become the OED. He placed newspaper ads, and more inventively put slips of paper inside certain library books that he thought would be read by the educated contributors he was seeking.
The ads asked for people to submit words with definitions supported by examples of those words in contemporary and classical writings.
Professor Murray noticed that a disproportionately high number of contributions came from a post box address in Reading. Intrigued as to the source of those contributions, he tracked the sender down to someone in Reading Jail. The Jail was the kind of place where the authorities placed all manner of people, some genuinely disturbed, and others (like Oscar Wilde) whom they found hard to categorize.
The Professor eventually identified his prodigious contributor as linguistics expert Dr. William Minor ("The Madman"), who was incarcerated for life for having committed murder in 1872, alledgely driven by the atrocities he'd witnessed in the American Civil War.
Who knew that the detailed account of how the first OED was compiled would be such a fantastic story.
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