The professor and the madman

Description

Simon Winchester reconstructs the nineteenth-century effort to create the Oxford English Dictionary, an undertaking that sought to capture the history and meaning of the English language on an unprecedented scale. Professor James Murray directs the project, gathering definitions while confronting the practical limits of scholarship, time, and human endurance. Among his most prolific contributors is Dr. W. C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran confined to an asylum for the criminally insane, who submits more than ten thousand definitions. Their intertwined work gives the dictionary’s creation an intimate human dimension. The book examines how intellectual ambition, obsessive labor, genius, and mental illness converged behind a reference work built to impose order on a restless language.

Themes