The Professor and the Madman

One word—and only one word—was ever actually lost: bondmaid,

The total length of type—all hand-set, for the books were done by letterpress, still discernible in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper—is 178 miles, the distance between London and the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers

Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

There was always sadness when the time came for the editor to leave: The keys would turn, the gates would clang shut, and Minor would be left alone again, trapped in a world of his own making, redeemed only when, after a day or so of quiet mourning, he could take down another volume from his shelves, select a needed word and its most elegant context, pick up his pen, and dip it in the ink to write once more: “To Dr. Murray, Oxford.”

Early treatments for the disease, which were just being introduced at the time of Minor’s final decline, involved the use of massive sedatives like chloral hydrate, sodium amytal, and paraldehyde. Today entire shelves of costly antipsychotic drugs are available at least to treat and manage schizophrenia’s more discomfiting symptoms. But so far, and despite the spending of fortunes, there have been precious few advances in staying the mysterious triggers that seemingly set off the illness and its demonic mischiefs.

He was for a while a devoted reader of T. H. Huxley—the great Victorian biologist and philosopher who coined the term agnostic.

Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known than the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

After a decade of languishing in the dark slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation, and remove, Minor felt that at last he was being hoisted back up onto the sunlit uplands of scholarship. And with what he saw as this reenlistment in the ranks, so Minor’s self-worth began, at least marginally, to reemerge, to begin seeping back. From the little evidence that survives in his medical records, he appears to have started recovering his confidence and even his contentment, both with every moment that he spent reading Murray’s acceptance letter, and then when he prepared to embark on his self-set task.

had not the ginger to keep the hundreds of volunte

and on April 15, 1755, there appeared:
A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the Words are deduced from their Originals and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers to which are prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in Two Volumes.