Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Rokus: My second reading of this fascinating book about a maybe-not-so-fascinating topic: words. The story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary is juiced up with the bios of scarcely known William Minor and James Murray. Ordered hard cover for permanent keeping and maybe for yet another read. Book itself is presentable, well-written and was delivered on time.

Canada on Mar 26, 2023

pearl: Oxford English Dictionary (OED) の編纂を巡るドキュメンタリー．既に映画化されているようであるが，たまたま少し前に，OEDの歴史を題材とした小説 "The Dictionary of Lost Words"...

Japan on Mar 13, 2023

Kindler: 第１章の冒頭でいきなり殺人事件から始まる展開もそうですが、この本の思わせぶりなタイトルから受けるイメージや映画化されたことなどを重ね合わせると誰もがOED(Oxford English Dictionary)誕生期のフィクションであろうと思い込みがちですが、これがノンフィクションだというのだから驚きです。

OED創刊にまつわる不思議な話はいくつかありますが、一つ目はなぜ多大の貢献をしたとされる米国人で殺人犯で精神錯乱者の William Chester Minor が辞書作りに参画できたのか？
更にはオックスフォード大学は英国中の俊英を集め多くの学者を輩出していたはずなのになぜ大学教育を受けて学位を取得したわけでもなく独学で多言語に通暁しただけのスコットランド人のJames...

Japan on Nov 25, 2022

Glen G Stone: A now classic tale that launched Winchester's incredible career. Fascinating story, well told, and qith surprising research that gives it a tragic twist.
If you don't know the story of the madman who helped write the greatest dictionary in history, or if you THINK you know the story, you really must read this book!

Canada on Sep 30, 2022

Metropolitan Critic: The Professor and the Madman tells the story of Dr W.C. Minor, a Victorian murderer who became one of the most important contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, posting his work to the editor of that dictionary from his cells in Broadmoor. Minor was spared the noose after the court had decided - rightly - that he was insane.

Winchester's book has been criticised on two grounds. First, that the basic story is rather thin for book length treatment and has been extended by means of background material, ornate physical descriptions and so on. Second, that the boundary between fact and fiction is not clear.

As for the first charge, it's true that the story is developed at a slow and careful pace, but the background material is compelling. Thus we learn about the enlightened treatment of the insane in the English criminal justice system, the brutal punishments in use in the American Civil War (including branding), the history of dictionary making, the categorisation of mental illness.

On the charge of fictionalisation, Winchester should I think be acquitted - for example he rejects the attractive (but untrue) tale that the editor of the OED, James Murray,...

United Kingdom on Jul 26, 2011

Cornelia Guest: Any lover of words cannot fail but be intrigued by this engrossing story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came into being--and how two very different men found their lives entwined by their mutual love of words, books, and language.

What is most striking about this story is that prior to 1692, English dictionaries did not exist. In Shakespeare's time, there was no source for definitions and spellings (which may account for the great variety of spellings during that time). Words were defined by their usage in books. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language, which defined 43,500 selected headwords. It remained the standard for the next century.

In 1857, Dr. Richard Trench, a member of London's Philological Society, came up with a great plan: to collect in a "big dictionary" all the words in the English language, with their pronounciations, definitions, and usages. Each word was to be accompanied with quotations illustrating its various meanings and its first recorded use.

Trench proposed that an army of amateur volunteers be recruited to read certain books, looking for words, each of which they would...

United States on Feb 03, 2010

Cynthia K. Robertson: After reading Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, I was anxious to read his related book, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. What an incredible story! Although smaller in scope than The Meaning of Everything, The Professor and the Madman still details some of the key elements about the creation of the dictionary, along with an unlikely relationship that developed in its making.

The story of the Oxford English Dictionary is itself fascinating story. Taking almost 70 years to complete, the OED has become the gold standard of what a dictionary should be. But compiling the OED was no easy task. The editors decided that they wanted not only the spellings and meanings but also, the history of each word. When they realized what a gigantic task this was going to be, they recruited "hundreds and hundreds of unpaid volunteers." Their job was to comb through volumes of books, newspapers, magazines and journals to come up with various words and the sentences in which they appeared. At the time, Dr. James Murray was the editor of the OED, and this plea to the...

United States on Feb 19, 2006