A short life of the author
Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915) was a Scottish schoolmaster and self-taught philologist who became the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary — the greatest lexicographic project in the history of the English language. He took on the editorship in 1879, working from a corrugated iron “Scriptorium” in his Oxford garden, and spent the remaining thirty-six years of his life defining words from A through T, dying before the dictionary was completed in 1928.
Murray’s life and the extraordinary collaborative process behind the OED — in which thousands of volunteer readers submitted quotations illustrating word usage — was the subject of Simon Winchester’s bestselling The Professor and the Madman (1998).
Collecting Murray
The original fascicles of the OED as they were published (1884–1928) are collected by historians of English and bibliophiles. Complete sets of the first edition (10 volumes plus supplement, 1928) are significant reference-library items. Murray’s personal correspondence and papers are held by the Bodleian Library. Books about Murray and the OED, particularly Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, are also collected.