Subtitled “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” this book has something for everyone. For bibliophiles and verbivores, there are all the dictionary details. Did you know that it took seventy years to produce the first edition of the OED? Or that there are 414,825 words defined in the OED? Did you know that the team of lexicographers who produced the dictionary included many unpaid volunteers who read and copied out quotations from a myriad of sources? Did you know that they mislaid one word, only one, bondsmaid? It was found long after the volume in which it would have been included was published, and it was later included in a supplement to the dictionary which came out in 1933.

I can tell, though, that some of you are more interested in the murder and insanity. Well, one of those lowly, unpaid volunteers, one who made himself indispensible to the dictionary project, was an American living in Britain. Unknown at first to the editor of the dictionary and his team of lexicographers, this American, a medical doctor, who sent in thousands of useful citations that were used in the final dictionary, was also a resident of England’s second most famous mental hospital, Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It was an interesting collaboration, to say the least.

So if your interests extend to crime, murder, paranoia, mayhem, the development of the English language, or lexicography, you’ll find something of interest in this book. I noticed the other day that Ms. Mental Multivitamin has a copy of this book in her library.
I borrowed mine from the public library.

By the way, did you know that Shakespeare didn’t have a dictionary?

Whenever he came to use an unusual word, or to set a word in what seemed an unusual context—and his plays are extraordinarily rich with examples—he had almost no way of checking the propriety of what he was about to do. . . . Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not as the saying goes, “look something up.” . . . Indeed, the very phrase did not exist.

Maybe that’s why Shakespeare was so inventive with words and phrases, no dictionaries to hem him in and tell him what he couldn’t do.

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