When James Murray, the then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), received the first bundle of quotations from a “Dr William Chester Minor” of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1883, he presumed the man worked there. In the first volume of the dictionary, published five years later, Minor is thanked as “Dr WC Minor, Crowthorne, Berks”. It was only in 1890 that Murray discovered the truth: that while Minor was an American surgeon, he was also a paranoid schizophrenic and probable sex addict who had been committed to Broadmoor after shooting a man dead.
Still, Murray continued to value Minor’s offerings. Only in 1902, when Minor, suffering delusions of a sexual nature, cut off his own penis, did his work cease (he survived, and died in 1920 in Connecticut).
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