The Words That Came from Broadmoor

In a room at Broadmoor, an American doctor spent years reading books that had been printed before he was born. He copied out sentences by hand, one slip at a time, and mailed them to Oxford. The sentences contained the evidence for words such as guz, an Indian measure of length, and hundreds of other terms that a dictionary editor needed to explain.

The reader was William Chester Minor. He was not a librarian, a professor, or an Oxford don. He was a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he had been confined after shooting and killing George Merritt in London in 1872. His work for what became the Oxford English Dictionary did not erase that fact. It did something stranger: a violent act and a vast work of scholarship became permanently joined in the dictionary’s making.

The dictionary that needed a crowd

The OED was conceived as a history of English, not merely a list of definitions. Its editors wanted evidence showing when a word appeared, how its meaning changed, and what it had meant in different periods. That required finding sentences in books scattered across centuries. No small editorial office could read everything.

The project therefore turned its readers into a distributed research machine. The Philological Society first appealed for volunteers in 1857. James Murray, who became the dictionary’s chief editor, renewed the appeal in 1879, asking the English-speaking and English-reading public to read assigned books and copy out useful quotations. Oxford supplied slips with bibliographical instructions. Readers supplied the language.

A quotation slip was not a definition. It was a small piece of proof. A reader copied a sentence, marked the word it illustrated, and recorded the book and page. The slips were filed by word until an editor was ready to decide which examples belonged in the entry. The dictionary was assembled from this enormous paper memory, not written in one continuous act of inspiration.

Minor seems to have encountered the appeal soon after arriving at Broadmoor. The exact route by which he joined the project is not documented, and that uncertainty matters. The familiar story makes his discovery sound like a neat coincidence. The surviving evidence suggests something less theatrical and more revealing: he saw a task suited to his education, his books, and the long hours of institutional life, then did it methodically.

A second room for books

Minor had served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war he travelled to England, where delusions led him to believe that an intruder had entered his room. On 17 February 1872 he shot Merritt, a passer-by on his way to work at the Red Lion Brewery. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was admitted to Broadmoor on 17 April and remained there for decades.

The details of his illness are part of the record, but they are not the explanation for his scholarship. His condition did not make him a dictionary. His literacy, money, education, and access to books did. Broadmoor allowed him an unusually large personal library, eventually giving him a second room for it. The arrangement turned confinement into a peculiar kind of archive.

Minor read old books with a purpose. For each work, he made an index of interesting words and usages, with page references. Then he copied selected passages onto slips and sent them to the dictionary office. The OED archive holds forty-two of his word indexes. They range across philosophy, economics, art, medicine, and travel. Nearly half concern foreign places, an apt interest for a man born in Ceylon, raised in America, and confined in England.

One of his books was John Fryer’s account of travels in East India and Persia, published in 1698. Minor’s excerpts from it helped supply quotations for almost a thousand OED entries. Another book, a satirical account of London life from 1700, provided material for more than two hundred. This is the unglamorous shape of historical knowledge: not a flash of genius, but a reader noticing a useful sentence on page 147 and putting it in the right pile.

The editor met the contributor

For years, Murray knew Minor as a remarkably productive correspondent. The letters came from Broadmoor, but the address did not announce the whole story. The 1888 preface to the dictionary credited him with between 5,000 and 8,000 quotations. He continued working until ill health stopped him in 1902.

Murray eventually visited him. The meeting did not produce a dramatic partnership between two equal scholars. It revealed a relationship that had already existed through paper: an editor trying to keep a gifted, isolated contributor interested, and a patient finding a stable intellectual task inside a life governed by delusion and confinement. In a letter quoted by the OED researchers, Murray wrote that Minor needed “nursing, encouraging and coaxing” because of his lonely position.

The numbers grew. In 1899, Minor sent 12,000 quotations in a single year, according to the OED’s account of its individual readers. Murray later ranked his contributions second only to those of the philologist Fitzedward Hall in illustrating the literary history of words. “We could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone,” Murray said of Minor’s work.

That praise needs a qualification. The number of slips a volunteer sent was not the number of quotations printed. Editors selected, checked, arranged, and sometimes rejected the material. Minor did not write the definitions, settle etymologies, or control the final entries. He supplied raw evidence, and the editors turned it into a public reference work.

What the slips leave out

The story is often told as a paradox: a murderer helped create the great dictionary of the English language. It is a memorable sentence, but it puts the wrong thing at the centre. Merritt is reduced to the event that begins Minor’s unusual second life, while the man who was killed disappears behind the contributor’s fame. A dictionary can preserve a word’s history with great precision and still inherit the blind spots of the stories told about its makers.

Minor’s contribution is more interesting when it is understood as a question about institutions. The OED did not ask volunteers to be admirable. It asked them to be useful. Its system could accept scholarship from people who were distant, eccentric, unknown, or otherwise unable to join an academic community. A nineteenth-century asylum became, through correspondence and paper, one node in a worldwide reading network.

That did not make the network neutral. Books cost money. Time was not distributed equally. Editors decided what counted as evidence, and the surviving archive is fuller for some readers than for others. Minor’s work mattered because it entered a system that could sort and verify it, not because solitary effort is automatically virtuous.

The OED’s first edition was finally completed in 1928, after roughly seventy years of appeals, reading, filing, editing, and printing. Minor died two years earlier, his private work scattered across thousands of slips and the books that generated them. The finished dictionary gives each quotation the appearance of a clean fact. It rarely shows the rooms, illnesses, wages, crimes, marriages, and patient routines that made those facts available.

Every historical dictionary is therefore also a record of attention: proof that somebody looked closely at a sentence and decided it should not be lost. In this case, some of that attention came from behind a locked door. The words escaped anyway, carrying with them a history no definition could contain.