The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. The task would be gigantic, monumental and – according to the conventional thinking of the times-impossible’. A dictionary, he declared, ‘is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view’, and he went on to recommend a comprehensive lexicon of the language that, as Simon Winchester has it, ‘would demonstrate not merely meaning, but the history of meaning, the life story of each word …. The idea was first floated in 1857 in an address to the London Philological Society by the Dean of Westminster, Richard Chevenix Trench. It was initiated as a conscious effort to define and fix the English language, that vital tool of empire-building.

The OED is one of the greatest legacies of the Victorian age of endeavour and optimism.

The journalist and author Simon Winchester first came across it, he tells us, in Jonathan Green’s 1996 study, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and th e Di ct ionari es They Made, which sent him on to Caught in th e Web of Words, a biography of James Murray, the first editor – in effect, the maker – of the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary, written by Murray’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Murray. The main characters are a pair of Victorian gentlemen, learned, serious, highly respectable, remarkable only in that one of them is a lexicographer of genius, the other a madman and a murderer. The geographical span is wide, from Dickensian London to Florida’s Pensacola Bay, from the beaches at Trincomalee to the Civil War battlefields of the United States. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, arcane obsessions, weird learning, ghastly comedy, all set out in an atmosphere of po-faced, high neo-Gothic. No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. charged with murder!_'A weird and wonderful story of an eccentric friendship, and a slice of history' Sunday Times'What a revelation.īeautifully told and awe-inspiring' Daily Mail'Simon Winchester could not have told it better. Minor, a millionaire and American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand of those words.īut when the committee insisted on honouring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. An extraordinary tale of madness, genius and obsession, discover the true story of the two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - and literary history!The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken.Īs definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr.

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