The Surgeon of Crowthorne
The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language.
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What Hacker News says
- I found The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester to be a fascinating read about James Murray and how he came to write the OED.
It is ironic that the definitive book on the English language was compiled by an American, and that he made it while he was incarcerated in an asylum for murder just makes the tale more interesting.
Simon Winchester is an excellent storyteller and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is an entertaining and insightful book - highly recommended!
- As an aside, Winchester's books on the development of the Oxford English Dictionary are wonderful, especially "The Surgeon of Crowthorne".
- His book, Outposts, is a really decent read. Not as good as his original bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outposts:_Journeys_to_the_Survi...
- Wikipedia? Are you going to take the word of a bunch of internet lunatics?
To be serious, the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne describes it as if their decades-long work was going at a snail's pace and Dr. Minor was crucial to making sufficient progress and avoiding the project being cancelled.
