The Professor and the Madman

The Oxford English Dictionary was built by volunteers. Readers all over the world were asked to send in slips recording how words were actually used, and one contributor sent in tens of thousands of them, of unusually high quality, for twenty years. When the editor finally went to thank him he found that the man was an American army surgeon, that he was confined at Broadmoor, and that he was there for murder.

Winchester tells two stories against each other: the dictionary's, which is a seventy-year feat of organisation with no precedent, and W.C. Minor's, which is a Civil War surgeon's mind coming apart in a way nobody at the time could name. The slips were the work of a man with an enormous library, unlimited time and nothing else to do.

It is short and briskly told, and it is essentially about method — how you would go about proving what a word means, with no computers and no prior example. The central relationship between Minor and the editor James Murray is handled with restraint, and some of the more theatrical details of their first meeting have since been questioned.