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Lexical Lunacy: The Enigmatic Minds Behind the Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford searching for first use of 'email' - The Economic Times

In "The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary", author Sarah Ogilvie found “an above average number of ‘lunatics’” among the Dictionary People.

“Was it their madness that drove them to do so much Dictionary work, or was it the Dictionary work that drove them mad?”

In the Oxford English Dictionary, a "Dr WC Minor"is referred to as a contributor only to be discovered later that, while he was an American surgeon, he was also a paranoid schizophrenic probable sex addict who had been committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after shooting a man dead. Another subeditor and reader, John Dormer – who seems from his quotations (“humbug”, “minx”, “hanky panky”) to have been rather fun – was admitted to Croydon Mental Hospital aged 35 in 1907, hearing voices. Eustace Frederick Bright, who started contributing as an 18-year-old medical student, was addicted to cocaine and morphine, and died of an overdose, aged 29, on the toilet floor at Walthamstow train station. Sidney John Herrtage was an editorial assistant who, it turned out, had “a kind of kleptomania for books.”

Ogilvie posits Henry Spencer Ashbee, owner of the world’s then largest collection of pornography and erotica, as the most likely hand behind slips for words such as “imperforated, lacking a normal or functional orifice”, “exspuition, spitting out from the mouth” and the self-explanatory “devirgination”.

Eadweard Muybridge, an early pioneer in motion pictures who shot his wife’s lover, was a contributor, as was John Richardson, who is believed to have engaged in cannibalism and killed an indigenous man during John Franklin’s doomed first voyage in search of the Northwest Passage.

Inspired by The New Statesman's article "How to build a dictionary" by Pippa Bailey


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