Sir James Murray

Sir James Murray (born February 7, 1837, Denholm, Roxburghshire [now Scottish Borders], Scotland—died July 26, 1915, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) was a Scottish lexicographer and the first editor (from 1879) of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, now known as The Oxford English Dictionary. He was knighted in 1908.

(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)

Murray was a grammar-school teacher from 1855 to 1885, during which time he also wrote a famous article on the English language for Encyclopædia Britannica (1878) and served as president of the Philological Society (1878–80, 1882–84). He undertook the editing of a vast dictionary that was intended as an inventory of words used in English from the mid-12th century and, in some instances, from earlier dates. Construction of the dictionary was to be grounded on strict historical and descriptive principles, and each definition was to be accompanied by an example, including date, of usage. With the assistance of countless volunteers, who sent in research and thousands of quotations to assist in crafting the word entries, the first section, A–Ant, appeared in 1884, printed at the Clarendon Press, Oxford. From 1885 until his death, Murray lived at Oxford, working with a staggering volume of materials and completing about half of the dictionary, sections A–D, H–K, O, P, and T. It was his organization that made completion of the great undertaking possible.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998) by Simon Winchester recounts Murray’s correspondence with one of his more prolific volunteers contributing to the publication, a learned expatriate veteran of the American Civil War named Dr. W.C. Minor, an inmate of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, England.