The dictionary was built by strangers

Through the 1880s, a small parcel of paper slips arrived at a corrugated-iron shed in a back garden in Oxford, as one did most weeks. Each slip carried the same three things in a careful hand: a single word, a date, and a sentence — a quotation copied out of some book to show the word actually doing its work in the wild. The shed belonged to James Murray, editor of what was then called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles and is now simply the Oxford English Dictionary. The sender was one of the finest volunteer readers the whole vast project ever had. What Murray was slow to grasp was where the slips were coming from: Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane, where the reader was being held for killing a man.

To see why that is more than a piece of trivia, you have to understand what strange new kind of book Murray was trying to make.

A word is not decreed; it is shown

Before the OED, a dictionary was essentially an authority's pronouncement. A learned man — Samuel Johnson, most famously — sat down and told you what a word meant, on his own say-so, seasoning the verdict with whatever examples he liked. The dictionary the Victorians set out to build in 1857 turned that on its head. In a pair of papers to the Philological Society, Richard Chenevix Trench argued that a real dictionary should not rule on the language at all. It should be a record of it. The lexicographer's job was not to hand down meanings but to find them — to gather every word English had ever used, trace each one through dated quotations from its first known appearance to the present, and let that evidence show how the word had lived, shifted and split into its senses.

That single decision — meaning is not declared, it is demonstrated by real use across time — is what made the OED the OED. It is also what made it almost impossibly large. You cannot demonstrate the life of every word in a language by yourself. You need the sentences, millions of them, and you need people to go and find them.

Made of quotations, mailed in by post

So Murray did something a lexicographer had rarely done: he asked the public for help. In 1879, newly appointed editor, he printed An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public and had it circulated through bookshops and libraries across Britain, America and the colonies. The request was simple. Read books — old ones, ordinary ones, anything — and whenever a word was used in a way worth recording, copy the sentence onto a slip of paper, note the source and date, and post it in.

Hundreds of readers answered, then thousands. The slips came by the sackful. Murray built a special workshop to hold them — a corrugated-iron shed he called, with some grandeur, the Scriptorium, fitted with 1,029 pigeon-holes for sorting quotations alphabetically. His task, and his assistants', was to take the heap of slips gathered for a single word, spread them out, and read the meaning off the evidence: here is where it first surfaces, here is the sense it carried in 1500 and the different one it carried by 1700, here is where it forks in two. The definition was the last thing written, not the first — a conclusion drawn from the sentences, not a decree imposed on them.

It took half a century. The first instalment, covering A to Ant, appeared in 1884; the final volume did not arrive until 1928, long after Murray's own death. The finished dictionary ran to twelve volumes, defined 414,825 words, and quoted 1,827,306 illustrative sentences — and those were only the ones that survived the cut, sifted from several million slips that readers had mailed in over the decades. It is, in the most literal sense, a dictionary built by strangers.

The most useful reader in England

The most remarkable of those strangers was Dr William Chester Minor. He was American, Yale-trained, and had served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War — an experience that seems to have broken something in him. Winchester's account dwells on the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, where Minor was reportedly made to brand a deserter's face; afterwards he was tormented by delusions of persecution, convinced men were breaking into his room at night to harm him. He came to London, and in the small hours of a February morning in 1872, in Lambeth, he chased one of these imagined intruders into the street and shot dead a real and entirely innocent man — George Merrett, a brewery stoker walking to an early shift, a husband and father of several children. A court found Minor not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him to Broadmoor, where he would spend most of the rest of his life.

He was, by asylum standards, a privileged inmate: an army pension, and two cells, one of which he filled with a large personal library of old books. When Murray's Appeal reached him there, Minor found the one thing that could give his ruined days a shape. And he did not simply read and send whatever words happened to catch his eye, the way most volunteers did. He did something cannier. He indexed his own library — compiling his own catalogue of exactly where interesting words appeared across his shelves — so that when he learned which part of the alphabet the editors were working on, he could open his index and supply precisely the quotations they were missing. He fed the machine exactly where it was hungry. Over roughly two decades he sent in tens of thousands of slips, and the editors came to lean on him. In 1899 Murray paid him the compliment a contributor dreams of:

"We could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone."

The visit

The version of the story everyone loves to tell has Murray, after years of correspondence, finally travelling out to meet his mysterious star reader around 1891 — and discovering to his astonishment that the distinguished "Dr Minor" was an inmate, not a physician. It is a wonderful scene, and it is mostly embellished; the two men had been writing to each other for years, and Murray knew perfectly well where the letters came from. What is true, and better, is that the friendship was real. Murray visited Broadmoor for years, brought Minor books, and later campaigned for his release. In 1910, with the sign-off of the Home Secretary of the day — a young Winston Churchill — Minor was freed and sent home to America. He died in 1920; Murray had died in 1915, with the great dictionary still unfinished around him. The story was later gathered by Simon Winchester into The Surgeon of Crowthorne (published in America as The Professor and the Madman, 1998).

What the slips knew

Here is why the story belongs in a journal about learning words, and not just in a book of curiosities. The principle that built the dictionary is the same principle that builds a vocabulary. Murray's editors could not conjure a word's meaning out of thin air, however clever they were. They had to wait until enough real sentences lay side by side on the desk for the meaning to stand out on its own — a shape you could suddenly see once the examples lined up, but never before. A definition was a thing you earned from usage, not a thing you started with.

That is exactly how a word settles into a human head, too. A translation stapled to a foreign word is a decree, and it behaves like one: brittle, easy to forget, prone to snapping the moment the sentence changes shape. A word you have met the OED's way — in real sentences, with its history and its relatives around it, returned to across days until the meaning arrives without being summoned — is a word you actually own. Each sentence you meet it in is one of Minor's slips: a small piece of evidence, and once you have enough of them, the meaning is no longer something you look up. It is something you simply know.

The largest dictionary in the English language turned out to be, at bottom, a very great pile of sentences — gathered patiently, by people who loved words, some of them from very dark rooms — until the words could be read. That is the whole idea behind vocabla, shrunk to fit a single learner: not definitions handed down, but words met in context, kept, and brought back until they are yours. You are doing, in miniature, what a thousand strangers did for Murray — collecting the sentences a word lives in, one slip at a time, until it finally means something.