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

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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Simon Winchester is a masterful writer. The Oxford English Dictionary or OED is the premier dictionary of the English language and the world’s most comprehensive single-language print dictionary according to the Guinness Book of World Records. One of its main contributors was Dr. W. C. Minor but when the OED committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War doctor and veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.