How is a paranoid army surgeon like an encyclopedia compiler? A tale of two obsessions
Many an amateur word nerd has drawn a quizzical glance after an impromptu disquisition on the difference between "farther" and "further," but such minor obsessions pale beside the mutual monomania of James Murray and William Minor. As the man who shepherded the inaugural edition of the Oxford English Dictionary through its first three decades, Murray was fully sane, if uncommonly devoted. But the similarities with Minor, an American army surgeon who had been committed to a British mental asylum after murdering a man in a paranoid haze, are striking enough to suggest a strange kind of kinship.

His place of residence concealed by a nondescript mailing address, Minor was among the most diligent of the OED's contributors, the hundreds of amateur lexicographers who pored over all manner of written English, cataloguing words in all their myriad usages and searching, always, for their first appearances in print. That this was done with slips of paper slotted into innumerable cubbyholes at the OED Scriptorium boggles the mind, as does the 80+ years it took to see the dictionary from its conception through to its eventual publication in 1928.

Winchester tells the two men's stories separately for much of the book's first half, charting their vastly different courses and leading up to their epistolary collaboration and, eventually, the moment when Murray decided he must deliver his thanks for Minor's hard work in person. Much of the two men's lives has been lost to history, but Winchester fills in the gaps without undue embellishment, binding his tale with citations from the OED's dazzlingly comprehensive citations, each of which serves as a miniature history. Especially after reading Winchester's account, the sheer amount of labor that goes into each definition seems at least mildly cracked, but it's the kind of madness dreams are made of.