The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane—

“You will be detained in safe custody, Dr. Minor,” said the judge, “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.” It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.

The OED’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language.

“I am not yet so lost in lexicography,” he says in his famous preface, “as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.”