Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made

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When James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, went to visit one of his most indefatigable contributors at what Murray assumed to be a country house address, he discovered that the elusive man was in fact an inmate of the Bradmoor asylum. Throughout time, word collectors have proven an unusual breed, and their stories fill Chasing the Sun, Jonathon Green's scholarly and immensely readable history of lexicography. Contrary to Samuel Johnson's famous description of the lexicographer as no more than a "harmless drudge," Green celebrates the "drudge triumphant"; as interpreter and arbiter of language itself, the dictionary maker here proves to be closer to deity than to drudge.

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