![]() ![]() To help achieve this task, he recruited volunteer researchers who would submit descriptive quotations for words, in a similar fashion to how Wikipedia is formed through the work of volunteer editors who submit edits to articles. Murray’s project was of an unprecedented scale, as before the OED there were no dictionaries that could lay claim to defining every word in the English language. The book’s strong suit is in its convincing descriptions of the struggles that the two protagonists endured. ![]() Whenever I looked at the cover, an urge would well up within me to say the title out loud in a mocking tone before reading. ![]() We on the west side of the Atlantic received this book with the godawful title The Professor and the Madman it’s bad enough that it’s inaccurate (Murray wasn’t a professor) and overly reductive (Minor being the “madman”), but the title just seems more fitting for a silly cartoon than a biographical work. William Chestor Minor, the former being the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary until his death, and the latter being one of the dictionary’s most prolific contributors. It describes the lives of Sir James Murray and Dr. ![]() The Surgeon of Crowthorne is a book by Simon Winchester of The Guardian, published in 1998. I was given this book to read and so I figured I’d share some thoughts on it. ![]()
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