The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester

HarperCollins, 242 pages, $22

People obsessed with words tend to be a little crazy, and who can blame them? It's a lonely fate, after all, to care what parameter really means, or where the expression "cut the mustard" comes from. But as manias go, such things are generally benign. It's hard to imagine this type of crank doing anyone harm.

There was considerably more menace in William Chester Minor, whose name lurks within the massive list of contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. Of all the volunteers who helped build this lexicographical monument, Minor was perhaps the most prolific; from the early 1880s until a little after 1900, he mailed the project's editor, James Murray, page upon page of neatly written citations illustrating the meaning, history, and usage of some 10,000 words -- words as common as art and as obscure as cutcherry. As legend has it, the grateful Murray invited Minor to Oxford repeatedly but in vain; he finally set out to visit his reclusive correspondent and found himself at the gates of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Minor, he learned to his shock, had been confined there for more than 20 years.

According to Simon Winchester, the real story was not quite as dramatic as that: Murray had learned the truth about Minor from a fellow scholar's chance remark before the two ever met. Still, for human drama, Minor's biography could hardly be improved upon. A Yale-educated surgeon from one of New England's most prominent families, he served in the Civil War and advanced to the rank of captain before erratic behavior -- delusions of persecution,

obsessive consorting with prostitutes -- forced his retirement. He then traveled to London, apparently hoping that a change of scene would help cure whatever ailed him (apparently, schizophrenia). It didn't work: one night, convinced that enemies were entering his rooms to torment him, he raced into the street and shot the first man he saw. He was incarcerated until the year before he died, frail and senile, nearly four decades later; and for many of those years, he clung to the dictionary work as his reentry ticket into productive existence.

Winchester, an award-winning journalist and travel writer, does full justice to this remarkable life -- and to that of James Murray, a self-made scholar of voracious curiosity and ambition who didn't quite live to see his work completed. The book offers not just a portrait of these two men and the touching, peculiar friendship that grew between them, but also a concise history of dictionary-making in general and the OED in particular. Winchester shows how such a project, with its glorious aims and demoralizing pitfalls, could have sprung only from the minds of the Victorians -- especially "the English, who had raised eccentricity and poor organization to a high art, and placed the scatterbrain on a pedestal."

With its Dickensian illustrations, the book itself is something of a tribute to the Victorian frame of mind; in his prose, too, Winchester affects a deliberately old-fashioned tone that you're either in the mood for or you're not. If you are, though, reading this book feels like sitting by a crackling fire as an erudite, bushy-sideburned great-uncle spins scholarly yarns.

-- Linda Lowenthal