The lunatic lexicographer: How a patient at a mental asylum shaped the Oxford English Dictionary

For years, Murray believed Minor was a neurologist working at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. He was stunned to learn that while Minor was indeed a physician, he was at Broadmoor not as a doctor but as a patient – institutionalised for a murder he had committed in 1872.

As Simon Winchester recounts in The Meaning of Everything (2003), “No one at the Dictionary, least of all James Murray, had hitherto suspected that their most assiduous contributor was a madman, a murderer, and an American.”

Minor’s early life: From Ceylon to America

William Chester Minor was born on June 22, 1834, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Eastman Strong Minor and his first wife, Lucy Bailey. His parents, originally from New England in the US, were Congregationalist missionaries, part of an evangelical Protestant movement dedicated to spreading their faith abroad.

Tragedy struck early in Minor’s life when his mother died of consumption (tuberculosis) when he was just three years old. Beyond this, little is known about his childhood in Ceylon. At age 14, he was sent to the United States to live with relatives in New Haven, Connecticut, while attending Hopkins Grammar School.

At 24, Minor enrolled at the Yale School of Medicine, where he specialised in comparative anatomy. To support himself during his studies, he worked part-time as an instructor at the Russell Academy and contributed to the 1864 revision of Webster’s Dictionary, which was being prepared at Yale under the supervision of Noah Porter. This early exposure to lexicography would foreshadow his later role in the creation of the OED.

However, Minor’s enthusiasm for the project far outstripped his ability. Samuel Stehman Haldeman, a renowned polymath and one of the early presidents of the American Philological Association, was particularly scathing in his assessment of Minor’s work.

Haldeman, who had recently published a landmark study on affixes and was known for his meticulous research in natural history, criticised Minor’s entries in a series of letters to George and Charles Merriam, the brothers who founded the publishing company that later became Merriam-Webster Inc, the publishers of Webster’s Dictionary. In his 1869 Southern Review article ‘American Dictionaries’, Haldeman devoted five of its 36 pages to cataloguing Minor’s errors, railing against the “incompetency of Dr. Minor”.

Despite these setbacks in the world of lexicography, Minor successfully graduated from Yale in 1863 with a medical degree. Shortly afterwards, he took a position at Knight General Hospital in New Haven before joining the Union Army as a military surgeon during the Civil War.

While serving in Virginia, he witnessed the horrors of the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, where 29,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in action. During his time on the battlefield, Minor was tasked with branding a deserter, an Irish soldier attempting to flee the Union Army.

Some accounts suggest that Minor became convinced that the branded man was a member of a secret society bent on persecuting him. Whether this was the first sign of his paranoid delusions or merely a harrowing wartime experience, his mental health would continue to deteriorate in the years to come.

Declining mental state

At the close of the Civil War, Minor’s military career seemed promising. He had risen through the ranks, earning a commission as a captain, aided by his Yale connections. Among his influential supporters was James Dana, Silliman Professor of Natural History and Geology at Yale, who described Minor as “one of the half dozen best (surgeons)…in the country.”

However, within a few years, Minor’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. While stationed on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, he began frequenting sex workers, spending much of his free time in the city’s red-light district. His paranoia escalated and he accused his superior officers of conspiring against him.

By 1868, Minor’s condition had deteriorated to the point that Army doctors diagnosed him as “delusional,” “suicidal,” and “homicidal”, according to his discharge reports. Recognising the severity of his mental instability, he voluntarily admitted himself to St Elizabeths Hospital, a lunatic asylum in Washington, D.C. Despite an 18-month stay, he showed no signs of improvement. Doctors ultimately concluded that he suffered from an incurable case of what we would now classify as post-traumatic stress disorder. Officially deemed “incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty,” Minor was honourably discharged from the Army with a pension.

In 1871, in an attempt to escape his worsening mental state, Minor travelled to London. He settled in Tenison Street, Lambeth, but his lifestyle remained as dissolute as ever. His delusions, particularly his belief that men were sneaking into his room at night through the floorboards and ceilings to torment him, persisted.

One night in February 1872, Minor awoke in a panic, convinced that an intruder was in his apartment. The shadowy figure fled, and Minor chased him into the streets. In his agitated state, he spotted a man walking to work at a nearby brewery – George Merrett, a father of six with another child on the way. Mistakenly believing Merrett to be his persecutor, Minor shouted at him, pursued him as he ran, and shot him dead near Waterloo Station.

Minor volunteered himself to the police with his subsequent trial revealing a long history of mental illness. Eventually, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead of a prison sentence, Minor was committed to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Despite his incarceration, Minor’s wealth and family influence ensured he received privileged treatment at Broadmoor. Because he was deemed non-violent and continued to receive his US Army pension, he was granted a comfortable two-room suite in Cell Block Two, colloquially referred to as ‘Swell Block Two’. According to Dr Patrick McGrath, a former superintendent of Broadmoor, Minor was afforded a standard of living well above that of other patients. He had fine dining and access to expensive wines, and even employed other inmates as servants.

Over the years, Minor amassed an extensive library of antiquarian books, many of which he ordered from London booksellers or had shipped from his hometown of New Haven. As Winchester describes, his reading tastes leaned toward “the obscure, the foreign, and the old”. Surrounded by literature, he eventually found solace in lexicography, his life’s final and most significant pursuit.

A pamphlet forges a link with the Oxford dictionary

In the early 1880s, perhaps nine or 10 years into his incarceration, Minor came across a pamphlet that would change his life. It had likely been tucked inside one of the many books brought to him by Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he had murdered, with whom he had developed a remarkable friendship. The pamphlet was a call for volunteers to assist in compiling what was then called ‘A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles’, the ambitious lexicographical project that would later become the Oxford English Dictionary.

With his vast personal library of antiquarian books, Minor threw himself into the work. He meticulously combed through rare volumes, extracting quotations that illustrated words’ meanings and their earliest known uses in English literature. He would regularly write to the OED editors, inquiring about their latest word and then promptly supply them with dozens of relevant citations.

For decades, Minor mailed thousands of word slips to Oxford every week. Though he continued to suffer from vivid hallucinations and paranoid delusions, his methodical research became both a purpose and a form of therapy. He dedicated himself to the dictionary for nearly 20 years, earning the admiration of OED editor Murray.

In 1899, Murray publicly acknowledged Minor’s extraordinary contributions, stating, “We could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.”

Despite the solace he found in lexicography, Minor’s mental health continued to deteriorate. By 1902, he was consumed by delusions that he was being abducted nightly from his cell and transported to distant locations, including Istanbul, where he believed he was forced to commit unspeakable acts of sexual violence. In an extreme act of self-mutilation, Minor attempted to prevent these imagined assaults by cutting off his penis with a knife typically used for dictionary work.

Recognising his deteriorating state, Murray personally advocated for his release. In 1910, after nearly four decades in Broadmoor, Minor was granted a pardon by Home Secretary Winston Churchill, then just 35 years old.

Deemed no longer a danger to society, Minor was deported back to the United States, where he was readmitted to St Elizabeths Hospital. There, he was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1919, he was transferred to the Retreat for the Elderly Insane in Hartford, Connecticut, where he died a year later in 1920.

Although Minor was far from the only volunteer contributor to the OED, nor even the most prolific, his dedication despite overwhelming mental illness made his efforts particularly exceptional. As Winchester observes, Minor’s story was one of “dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption…because he found in his work for the dictionary a form of therapy which made his tortured life a little more bearable perhaps”.