Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915) was a Scottish lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until his death in 1915. 1837 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... 1915 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... Royal motto: Nemo me impune lacessit (Latin: No one provokes me with impunity) Scotlands location within the UK Languages with Official Status1 English Scottish Gaelic Capital Edinburgh Largest city Glasgow First Minister Jack McConnell Area - Total - % water Ranked 2nd UK 78,782 km² 1. ... A lexicographer is a person devoted to the study of lexicography, especially an author of a dictionary. ... Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ... The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a comprehensive dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). ... 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... 1915 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ...

Life and learning

James Murray was born on 7 February 1837 in the village of Denholm near Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the eldest son of a draper. A precocious child with a voracious appetite for learning, he left school at the age of fourteen because his parents were not able to afford to send him to local fee-paying schools. At the age of seventeen he became a teacher at Hawick Grammar School and three years later was headmaster of the Subscription Academy there. A little village in the Scottish Borders ... Hawick (pronounced hoick) is a town in the unitary council region of Scottish Borders in the south of Scotland. ... Scottish Borders (Crìochan na h-Alba in Gaelic) is one of 32 unitary council regions in Scotland. ...

In 1861 Murray met a music teacher, Maggie Scott, whom he married the following year. They had a child in 1864, but the same year Maggie fell ill with tuberculosis. On the advice of doctors, they moved to London to escape the Scottish winters. Once there, Murray took an administrative job with the Chartered Bank of India, while continuing in his spare time to pursue his many and varied academic interests. Maggie died within a year of arrival in London, but a year later Murray was engaged again, to Ada Ruthven, and the following year married her. Tuberculous lungs show up on an X-ray image Tuberculosis is an infection with the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs (pulmonary TB) but can also affect the central nervous system (meningitis), lymphatic system, circulatory system (miliary TB), genitourinary system, bones and joints. ... The clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, which contains Big Ben London is the capital city of the United Kingdom and of England. ...

By this time Murray was primarily interested in languages and etymology. Some idea of the depth and range of linguistic erudition may be gained from a letter of application he wrote to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, in which he claimed an ‘intimate acquaintance’ with Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Latin, and to a lesser degree ‘Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects’. In addition, he was ‘tolerably familiar’ with Dutch, Flemish, German and Danish. His studies of Anglo-Saxon and Mœso-Gothic had been ‘much closer’, he knew ‘a little of the Celtic’ and was at the time ‘engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian’. He had ‘sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito’ and to a lesser degree he knew Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician. However, he did not get the job. In historical linguistics, etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The main entrance to the British Museum The British Museum in London is the United Kingdoms - and one of the worlds - largest and most important museums of human history and culture. ... Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ... Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... Provençal (Prouvençau in Provençal language) is one of several dialects of the Romance language Occitan, which is spoken by a minority of people in southern France and other areas of France. ... The term Flemish language can designate: the official language of Flanders, which is Dutch with only very small variations; any of the regional dialects of Dutch spoken in Belgium; these are more different from Dutch than the official language of Flanders; one of these dialects, the West Flemish. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... The Gothic language (*gutiska razda, *𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌹𐍃𐌺𐌰 𐍂𐌰𐌶𐌳𐌰) is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths and specifically by the Visigoths. ... Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, both those spoken by the ancient Celts, and those used by their modern descendants, the Gaels, Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. ... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ... Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by 6 million people mainly in Israel, parts of the Palestinian territories, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. ... Syriac is an Eastern Aramaic language that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. ... The Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures (also called the Hebrew Bible) constitutes the first major part of the Bible according to Christianity. ... The Peshitta is the standard version of the Bible in the Syriac language. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. ... Arabic (العربية al-arabiyyah, or less formally arabi) is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The Coptic Language is the last phase of the Egyptian languages, and is the direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language written in the hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts. ... Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Phoenicia /Canaan (now Lebanon, coastal Syria and northern Israel ). Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ...

By 1869 Murray was on the Council of the Philological Society, and by 1873 had given up his job at the bank and returned to teaching at Mill Hill School in London. He then published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, which served to enhance his reputation in philological circles. A society in Great Britain dedicated to the study of language. ... Mill Hill School is a boarding and day school for pupils aged 13 - 18, located in Mill Hill, London, England. ... The clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, which contains Big Ben London is the capital city of the United Kingdom and of England. ...

Murray had eleven children, ten of these with Ada (and all having 'Ruthven' in their name, by arrangement with his father-in-law); the eldest, Harold James Ruthven Murray became a prominent chess historian. Harold James Ruthven Murray (June 24, 1868 - May 16, 1955) born in Peckham Rye, London, son of James Murray (editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), the eldest of eleven children, was most prominent as a chess historian. ... List of chess historians Harold Murray Thomas Hyde Hiram Cox Professor Duncan Forbes Richard Eales Edward Winter External links Initiative Group K nigstein Edward Winters Column at ChessCafe Categories: Stub ...

Murray and the OED

On 26 April 1878 Murray was invited to Oxford to meet the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, with a view to his being taking on hte job of editor of a new dictionary of the English language, to replace Johnson’s and to capture all the words then extant in the English speaking world in all their various shades of meaning. It would be a massive project, which required somebody with Murray’s knowledge and single-minded determination. Oxford is a city and local government district in Oxfordshire, England, with a population of 134,248 (2001 census). ... Oxford University Press (OUP) is a highly-respected publishing house and a department of the University of Oxford in England. ... ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A Dictionary of the English Language, one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language, was prepared by Samuel Johnson and published on April 15, 1755. ...

On 1st March 1879, a formal agreement was put in place to the effect that Murray was to edit a new English Dictionary. It was expected to take ten years to complete and be some 7,000 pages long, in four volumes. 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ...

Murray’s approach to compiling the dictionary was to be similar to Samuel Johnson’s in that the dictionary would use quotations to show the origins of words as well as their different meanings. The dictionary also sought to show through successive quotations how words changed in meaning over the centuries. Murray realized at the outset that no team could be assembled which would be able to gather such an extensive range of quotations (over 1,800,000 illustrative quotations were eventually included in the completed first edition, and many more than this were considered): instead Murray would build on the work started in the 1850’s during the first abortive attempt at starting the dictionary. He decided to appeal to readers all over the world, asking them to send him illustrative quotations on all words. His appeal, in April 1879, was printed in many of the newspapers and periodicals of the day, as well as being printed as a pamphlet and distributed to libraries and booksellers.

Readers were asked to follow a strict regime in sending in their quotations: they were to be on slips of paper, with the name of the book and date of publication, name of author and location of quotation, followed by the quotation itself. At the top of the slip was to be written the catchword – the word which was being defined.

In preparation for the work ahead Murray built a corrugated-iron shed in the grounds of Mill Hill School, called the Scriptorium, to house his small team of assistants as well as the flood of slips which started to flow in on foot of his appeal.

As work continued on the early part of the Dictionary, Murray gave up his job as a teacher and became a full time lexicographer.

Given the scale of the task, it had been decided to produce interim volumes of the Dictionary as the work was completed, so as to maintain interest, show progress and generate some cash flows. So the first fascicle or installment of the Dictionary was published on 29th January 1884, some 352 pages long covering all known English words from a to ant.

In the summer of 1884, Murray and his family moved to a large house on Banbury Road in Oxford. Murray had a second Scriptorium built in its back garden, a larger building than the first, with more storage space for the ever-increasing number of slips being sent to Murray and his team (anything addressed to ‘Mr Murray, Oxford’ would always find its way to him, and such was the volume of post sent by Murray and his team that the Post Office erected a special post box outside Murray’s house).

The team of helpers – including Murray’s own children – was employed to sort the slips, check for completeness, place them in alphabetical order and then categorise according to the parts of speech to which they belonged. One of Murray’s more trusted assistants would collate the information and quotations for each word and then try to coin a definition. Then the file for each word would be passed to Murray to perform a final review, write the etymology, decide on the pronunciation, select the supporting quotations and finally refine the definition. The work was then passed to the printers for typesetting and proofing.

Murray continued his work on the dictionary, age and failing health doing nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for the work he had devoted much of his life to. He died of pleurisy on 26th July 1915 and was buried in Oxford.

The Oxford English Dictionary

The Dictionary itself was finished twelve years later, with an announcement on New Year’s Eve 1927 that the copy for the last word to be included in the dictionary – zyxt – was in the hands of the printer.

All in all, the First Edition of the Dictionary was bound in twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and 1,827,306 quotations employed to illustrate their meanings.

A supplement was published in 1933, containing all the words that had evolved, changed meaning or appeared in the intervening years since work on the Dictionary had commenced. There were four more supplements published, between 1972 and 1986, before Oxford University Press issued a fully integrated Second Edition in 1989. With advances in technology, it was not long before a CD-ROM was available, followed in short order by the Dictionary online at www.oed.com.

A Third Edition is in progress.

Biographies

Murray's biography was written by his grand-daughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray: Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Yale University Press, 1977, ISBN 0300089198). More recently, Simon Winchester published The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (OUP, 2003, ISBN 0198607024). This is an article on biographies. ... Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908. ... 1977 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1977 calendar). ... Simon Winchester (born September 28, 1944) is a British author and scholar. ... 2003(MMIII) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Murray is the "professor" referred to in the book The Professor and the Madman (UK title The Surgeon of Crowthorne), even though he was never a professor in his life, having worked mostly as a bank clerk or a schoolteacher before going into lexicography. Dr. William Chester Minor, a volunteer who worked on the dictionary, was the "madman". The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester. ... William Chester Minor (W. C. Minor) (June 1834 – March 26, 1920) was an American surgeon who made many scholarly contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary while confined to a lunatic asylum. ...

External link

• http://www.bikwil.com/Vintage08/James-Murray.html