In the late 1870s, a man named William Chester Minor, confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, became one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. A Yale-trained surgeon and former military officer who had killed a man in London, Minor developed his own quotation-tracking system that allowed him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. His story, later retold in the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne and the 2019 film The Professor and the Madman, highlights the unexpected human connections that fueled the dictionary's creation. James Murray, the dictionary's editor, worked closely with Minor, unaware of his confinement until years later. This collaboration between a brilliant editor and a madman in an asylum underscores the dictionary's reliance on diverse, often overlooked contributors.
The Unlikely Origins of a National Treasure
The Oxford English Dictionary began as a project of the Philological Society, a small group of intellectuals in London unconnected to Oxford University. Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall were dissatisfied with existing English dictionaries and formed an Unregistered Words Committee in June 1857. Trench's report, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, identified seven shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries, including incomplete coverage of obsolete words and inconsistent dating of word usage. The society shifted its focus from covering only unlisted words to creating a comprehensive dictionary, formally adopting the idea on the 7th of January 1858. Volunteer readers were assigned books to copy passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips, a process that would eventually generate millions of slips. This grassroots effort laid the foundation for what would become the most authoritative historical dictionary of the English language.The Scriptorium and the Quotation Slips
James Murray, who took over as editor in the 1870s, worked in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the Scriptorium, lined with wooden planks and 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection, which concentrated on rare words rather than common usages. Murray appealed to the public for quotations on ordinary words, and by 1880, 2,500,000 slips had arrived at the Scriptorium. The first fascicle, covering words from A to Ant, was published on the 1st of February 1884, costing 12s 6d and selling only 4,000 copies. Murray's innovative approach to collecting and organizing these slips transformed the dictionary from a theoretical project into a tangible, evolving work. The Scriptorium became the heart of the dictionary's creation, where the collective efforts of volunteers and editors converged to build a linguistic monument.