Not long after his experience in the war, he was institutionalized for 18 months. Soon afterward, Minor joined the Union Army as a surgeon and was thrust into service during the Civil War. Minor graduated from Yale Medical School with a specialization in comparative anatomy in 1863. Whereas Murray came from a family of humble means, Minor’s family was one of the most elite in New England.

Minor was born in present day Sri Lanka in 1834 to Congregational Church missionaries who sent him back to the US at age 14. William Chester Minor, a man similar in appearance and intellect, but much different in every other way. It was a mission that would consume the rest of Murray’s life and forever link him to Dr. When Oxford University chose Murray to edit the OED, his mission was to update and largely replace the standard and most famous dictionary of the time, A Dictionary of the English Language, compiled by Samuel Johnson in 1755. Murray became a headmaster at the age of 20 and later worked in finance to support his family, but he remains a towering figure in British scholarship for his career as a largely self-taught linguist, philologist, and lexicographer. His parents could not afford to send him to school past the age of 14, but he had already acquired a working knowledge of multiple languages by that time. Murray was born in the Scottish Borders in 1837.

The dictionary’s first two editors, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall, used volunteer contributors after the Oxford University Press agreed to publish the project and James Augustus Henry Murray became its third editor in 1879, new appeals went out to the English-speaking and English-reading public for a new corps of volunteers by way of newspapers, magazines, and handbills. Although it would be more than two decades before the project would truly begin, the initial 1857 meeting presented the idea that a team of amateur, unpaid volunteers would help complete the monumental task.

The Philological Society of London conceived the OED in 1857 as one of the biggest literary undertakings in history their original title for it was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

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