This was okay, but just okay. The story is interesting, but the author is a little heavy handed with how amazing the story's 'coincidences' are. In fact, the only really compelling coincidence is the part about the horse race in the end notes... ( )

This was a surprisingly readable history of two unusual characters involved in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, I was not expecting a history. There is certainly dramatization of the history, but I was expecting more of a tale, a story, involving these characters rather than an overview of them and their times. It was interesting to learn some of the history that was tangent to the main individuals of the tale, but it did bog down the tale a little, especially towards the end.

I was quite lucky to read this just after reading 'Bable' by R. F. Kuang, which is a story set in Oxford around the same period. The perspectives are quite different. On one hand, you have 'Babel', which focuses on the injustice and inequity that people who were not white, British men were subject to; In 'The Professor and the Madman' we get a better sense of where this belief of superiority may have come from and why it was generally accepted. These two books, with very different perspectives, help to provide a more complete picture of the time (in some small way).

Overall, I thought the book was well-written and interesting. It is an interesting quirk of history that I enjoyed learning about. ( )

This is an interesting New Yorker article that has been stretched into a book. I was hoping for a story that has been spun around the history of the OED itself with Dr. Minor's story used only as a jumping-off point. Instead, the entire book revolves around Dr. Minor and, tragic and unconventional as it is, there just isn't enough there to justify a book length exposition. ( )

It amuses me that this book about the dictionary is written in a very wordy style, enough so that I forgive Winchester for dragging things out a wee bit too long. A fascinating story indeed, especially for a lexicography buff like myself.

Even someone who's never given a second thought to the dictionary may well enjoy this book. I suggested it to customer even before having read it myself; his enthusiasm and profuse thanks compelled me to move it up on my To Be Read list!

It's a quick read (albeit one with many marvelous words not often encountered these days)and I recommend it to anyone looking for a bit of history, and a fun reality-check with regard to the origins of the online dictionaries and phone apps we rely upon these days! ( )

I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: "Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?" and "Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like 'typewriter' and 'schizophrenia'?" and "The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?"

The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning -- the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.

Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with "monomacy" for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book. ( )