The Professor and the Madman — Simon Winchester

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This book is on my mind mostly because the other night on Netflix I stumbed across the film adaptation with Sean Penn & Mel Gibson (which surprisingly was good.)

The movie mostly focuses on the friendship that developed between James Murray, the editor of The Oxford English Dictionary, and William Chester Minor, a patient at Broadmore asylum, but the book spends a considerable about of time detailing the unbelievably monumentous task of cataloging and tracing the meaning and the history of every word in the English language (it took 70 years!)

It's a book about a dicitonary—the dictionary—and it's hard to put down.

Murray employed a strategy similar to Wikipedia, by asking readers across the English reading world to send him paper slips with words and passages of origin on them:

"Murray’s notes showed him how best this might be done. The quotations, said the editor’s first page, were to be written on half sheets of writing paper. The target word—the “catchword,” as Murray liked to call it—was to be written at the top left. The crucial date of the quotation should be written just below it, then the name of the author and title of the cited book, the page number, and finally, the full text of the sentence being quoted. Preprinted slips had already been prepared for some books that were important, well known, and likely to be used a great deal, familiar works by such as Chaucer, Dryden, Hazlett, and Swift—readers assigned to these books needed only write to Mill Hill to have some sent; otherwise, Murray asked them to please write out their own slips in full, arrange them alphabetically, and send them on to the Scriptorium. All this was simple enough. But, everyone wanted to ask—just what words were to be sought out? Murray’s early rules were clear and unambiguous: Every word was a possible catchword.

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