The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Read Online Free PDF

every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond.
    It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. Some call the language of the dictionary old-fashioned, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain when dealing with even so modest an oath as “bloody”: Though the modern editors place the original NED definition between quotation marks—it is a word “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word’, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) ‘b——y’”—even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for most: “There is no ground for the notion,” the entry reassures us, “that ‘bloody’, offensive as from associations it now is to ears polite, contains any profane allusion….”
    It is those with “ears polite,” one supposes, who see in the dictionary something quite different: They worship it as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires.
    But even they will admit of a number of amusing eccentricities about the book, both in its selections and in the editors’ choice of spellings; a small but veritable academic industry has recently developed in which modern scholars grumble about what they see as the sexism and racism of the work, its fussily and outdated imperial attitude. (And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word—though only one—that all admit was actually lost during the seven decades of the OED ’s preparation—though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)
    There are many such critics, and with the book being such a large and immobile target there will no doubt be many more. And yet most of those who come to use it, no matter how doctrinally critical they may be of its shortcomings, seem duly and inevitably, in the end, to admire it as a work of literature, as well as to marvel at its lexicographical scholarship. It is a book that inspires real and lasting affection: It is an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.
    The story that follows can fairly be said to have two protagonists. One of them is Doctor Minor, the murdering soldier from the United States, and there is one other. To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern from of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word—a dispute that helps illustrate the singular and peculiar way in which the Oxford English Dictionary has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.
    The word protagonist itself—when used in its general sense of meaning the leading figure in the plot of a story, or in a competition, or as the champion of some cause—is common enough. It is, as might be expected of a familiar word, defined fully and properly in the dictionary’s first edition of 1928.
    The entry begins with the customary headings that show its spelling, its pronunciation, and its etymology (it comes from the Greek  meaning “first” and  meaning “actor” or, literally, the leading character to appear in a drama). Following this comes the distinguishing additional feature of the OED —the editors’ selection of a string of six supporting quotations—which is about the average number for any one OED word, though some merit many more. The editors have divided the quotations under two headings.
    The first heading, with three sources quoted, shows how the word has been used to mean,