Murray was no whiner, but his letters tell a great deal about the difficulty of the task he had set himself—and that the publishers, who wanted to see a return on their investment, in turn had set him. The expressed hope was that two parts—six hundred pages of finished dictionary—might be published each year. Murray himself tried gallantly to complete work on thirty-three words every day—and yet “often a single word, like Approve…takes 3/4 of a day itself.”
