James Murray (Lexicographer)
Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (born February 7, 1837 in Denholm , Roxburghshire , Scotland , † July 26, 1915 in Oxford ) was a British lexicographer , philologist and from 1879 until his death the most important editor of the Oxford English Dictionary .
The son of a village tailor from Hawick was largely self-taught. Like most poor children, he left school when he was 14. From 1855 to 1863 he worked as a teacher at the Hawick Grammar School, then he worked as a bank clerk, and later again as a teacher in London. He also published works such as the Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873) and a contribution to the history of the English language in the Encyclopædia Britannica (1878), which identified him as an outstanding philologist and led him to the Philological Society the following year as editor of the large-scale New English Dictionary on Historical Principles . In the same year, Oxford University Press was also won as a publisher.
Murray immediately published a call for cooperation that booksellers attached to their books. In this way, thousands were won by employees who according citations examined, among them William Chester Minor . In 1884 Murray moved to 78 Banbury Road in north Oxford . His corrugated iron scriptorium , where he worked on most of his work, stood in the garden behind his house. Murray had originally calculated that he would have to edit 33 keywords a day, but sometimes it took him three quarters of a day for a single keyword, as he complained.
Murray planned the entire New English Dictionary and in 1913 he still managed to complete the letter T. The first part appeared in 1884 (letters from A to ANT) - a total of 352 pages for a price that would be around one euro today. In 1908 he was beaten for a Knight Bachelor's degree . Murray died on 26 July 1915 a pleurisy .
Completion of the dictionary in 125 parts took a total of 70 years, four times as long as originally planned. The complete work with 414,825 lemmas was completed in 1928. In 1933 the first supplementary volume was necessary; only since then has the work been known as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) .
In 1902 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy . In 1913 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , and in 1914 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
In 2019, The Professor and the Madman, a biography of Murray, was published, which in turn is based on the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne . Mel Gibson can be seen in the role of Murray .
literature
- KM Elisabeth Murray: Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. Yale University Press, New Haven 1977, ISBN 0-300-08919-8 .
- Simon Winchester: The Surgeon of Crowthorne. (UK title) / The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary. (US title) HarperCollins, 1998; German: the man who loved words
Web links
- Murray's biography on bikwil.com
- Digital copies of his works as author or editor in the Internet archive
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Murray, James |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Murray, James Augustus Henry (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British lexicographer and philologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 7, 1837 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Denholm , Roxburghshire , Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 26, 1915 |
| Place of death | Oxford |