Through the 1880s and 1890s, parcels of quotation slips arrived at James Murray's Scriptorium in Oxford — a corrugated-iron shed lined with pigeonholes — from an address in Crowthorne, Berkshire. The sender, Dr W. C. Minor, was courteous, scholarly and almost supernaturally productive, supplying the Oxford English Dictionary with evidence at a rate few volunteers could match. What the address actually meant took years to register. Broadmoor, Crowthorne, was Britain's asylum for the criminally insane, and Dr Minor was not on its staff. He was among its most notorious inmates: an American army surgeon who had killed a man in London, and who was quietly redeeming himself one word at a time.
The dictionary itself was a project of heroic overreach. Conceived by the Philological Society in 1857, it set out to record every English word, with dated quotations tracing each one's history — a task its founders imagined might take a decade. When Murray, a largely self-taught Scottish schoolmaster and philologist, became editor in 1879, he issued a public appeal for volunteer readers: comb through books of every era, copy out sentences showing words in use, and post the slips to Oxford. Thousands responded. Most sent material in dribs and drabs. One correspondent in Crowthorne turned the work into a system all of his own.
William Chester Minor was born to American missionary parents in Ceylon, trained in medicine at Yale, and served as a Union army surgeon in the American Civil War. The oft-told story traces his breakdown to the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, where he was said to have been ordered to brand a deserter's face — an episode that may well be embellished, though his later delusions did fixate on vengeful pursuers. After the war his paranoia deepened; the army eventually pensioned him off, and in 1871 he sailed for London, hoping rest would restore him. It did not. In February 1872, in the small hours in Lambeth, he shot dead George Merrett, a brewery stoker walking to his night shift — a father of six he had never met, whom his delusions had cast as an intruder.
The trial was brief. Found not guilty on the grounds of insanity, Minor was committed to Broadmoor, the asylum opened at Crowthorne in 1863, to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. As an educated gentleman with an American army pension, he was granted two adjoining cells, one of which he lined with antiquarian books. He painted, played the flute, and ordered volumes from London dealers. Somewhere in one of those parcels, most likely, he found Murray's appeal for readers.
The asylum lexicographer
Minor's genius was method. Other volunteers read a book and sent whatever struck them, so the editors drowned in quotations for common words while rare ones went begging. Minor instead compiled exhaustive word-indexes to his own library, asked Oxford which words were currently being edited, and supplied quotations to order — precisely the evidence needed, exactly when it was needed. Over roughly two decades he contributed tens of thousands of slips, and Murray said publicly that the dictionary could have illustrated the last four centuries of English from Minor's quotations alone, ranking him among the greatest of its volunteer contributors.
Then there is the story everyone tells. Murray, curious about his star contributor, travels to Crowthorne, is shown into a book-lined study and greets the dignified figure behind the desk — only to be told that this is the asylum's superintendent, and that Dr Minor is a patient. It is a perfect anecdote, and it is not true. The record shows Murray had learned the truth well before he visited; the embroidered version was popularised by an American journalist in 1915. Murray first went to Broadmoor in 1891 knowing exactly whom he would meet, and the two bearded, bookish Victorians became genuine friends, the editor returning many times over the following years.
The stranger mercy in the tale belongs to Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man Minor killed. Minor gave money from his pension to support her family, and for a time she visited him and delivered his parcels of books. His illness won in the end. In 1902, in a spasm of religious self-loathing, he mutilated himself gravely, and his health collapsed. In 1910 the Home Secretary — one Winston Churchill — authorised his release, and Minor was deported to America, where he died in Connecticut in 1920. Murray had died in 1915, knighted for his work but with the alphabet unfinished.
The first edition of the OED was finally completed in 1928, more than seventy years after it was conceived, treating over 400,000 word-forms. Minor's part remained a footnote until Simon Winchester's 1998 bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne — published in America as The Professor and the Madman, and filmed under that title in 2019 with Mel Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor. The greatest catalogue of the English language owes an unpayable debt to a mind that language could not save.
Quiz nuggets
- W. C. Minor, an American Civil War army surgeon, sent tens of thousands of quotation slips to the OED from inside Broadmoor asylum.
- Minor was committed after shooting brewery stoker George Merrett in Lambeth in 1872, found not guilty on the grounds of insanity.
- James Murray became the OED's editor in 1879, was knighted in 1908 and died in 1915, before the dictionary was finished.
- Home Secretary Winston Churchill authorised Minor's release from Broadmoor in 1910; the OED's first edition was completed in 1928.
- Simon Winchester's 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne became the 2019 film The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.