The audio version includes a bonus interview between Winchester and John Simpson, who at the time was an editor of the OED.
Winchester’s narration of the audio version is as good as that of many professional narrators I’ve listened to. The two men found common ground in their dedication to the OED over multiple decades. The biography of James Murray, editor of the OED, stands in contrast to that of the mentally ill Minor. Winchester examines Minor’s life, from his birth in Ceylon to missionary parents, his medical training, his experience as a Civil War physician, and his subsequent descent into the madness that resulted in murder. One of the volunteers who made a tremendous contribution to the work was William Chester Minor, an American who spent half his life in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. How did the editors research and compile such a massive work? With lots of help. The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, is the gold standard of English dictionaries.
It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.
The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions.
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