The OED's Most Prolific Contributor Was a Patient at Broadmoor

In 1879, James Murray took over editing what would become the Oxford English Dictionary. The project depended on volunteers across the English-speaking world copying out quotations from books — short passages illustrating how each word had actually been used over time. The dictionary's office was a corrugated-iron shed in Murray's Oxford garden. The volunteers were thousands of readers writing in.

One of them was Dr. William Chester Minor, of Crowthorne, Berkshire. Beginning in the 1880s, Minor sent in a stream of citations — eventually around ten thousand, sometimes twenty in a day, drawn from his private library. His submissions were so well chosen that Murray publicly thanked him in the dictionary's first volume in 1888 and again, more lavishly, in 1899: "we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone."

Murray assumed Minor was a retired physician with leisure for reading. The truth, which he learned in 1891, was that Minor had been a Yale-trained Union Army surgeon whose mental health had broken during the Civil War, that on February 17, 1872, in Lambeth, he had fatally shot a brewery stoker named George Merrett — whom he believed had broken into his room — and that he had been a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane ever since.

The two men met at Broadmoor in January 1891 and remained correspondents and friends for the rest of Minor's confinement. Minor read and indexed in his cell, paid for by his American family, supplying the OED with citations its sub-editors trusted on sight.

After 38 years inside, Minor was deported to the United States in 1910 — Home Secretary Winston Churchill signed the order. He died in 1920 in Hartford, Connecticut.