James Murray (lexicographer)

Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, FBA (/ˈmʌri/; 7 February 1837 – 26 July 1915) was a British lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.^[1][2]

Life and learning

James Murray was born in the village of Denholm near Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the eldest son of a draper, Thomas Murray. His brothers included Charles Oliver Murray and A. D. Murray, later editor of the Newcastle Daily Journal.^[3] He was christened plain 'James Murray', but in 1855 he assumed the extra names 'Augustus Henry' in order to distinguish himself from other James Murrays in the Hawick area.^[4] A precocious child with a voracious appetite for learning, he left school at fourteen because his parents were not able to afford to pay the fees to continue his education. At seventeen he became a teacher at Hawick Grammar School (now Hawick High School) and three years later he was headmaster of the Subscription Academy there. In 1856, he was one of the founders of the Hawick Archaeological Society.^[5]

In 1861, Murray met a music teacher, Maggie Scott, whom he married the following year. Two years later, they had a daughter Anna, who soon died of

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. He then published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, which served to enhance his reputation in philological circles. In 1881, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.^[8]

Murray had eleven children with Ada (all having 'Ruthven' in their name, by arrangement with his father-in-law, George Ruthven); the eldest,

He died of pleurisy on 26 July 1915 and requested to be buried in Oxford beside the grave of his best friend, James Legge.^[11]

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 taking on the 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.

On 1 March 1879, a formal agreement was put in place to the effect that Murray was to edit a new English Dictionary, which would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It was expected to take ten years to complete and be some 7,000 pages long, in four volumes. In fact, when the final results were published in 1928, it ran to twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and 1,827,306 citations employed to illustrate their meanings.^[12]

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 (bearing quotations illustrating the use of words to be defined in the dictionary) which started to flow in as a result 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.^{[citation needed]}

In the summer of 1884, Murray and his family moved to a large house on the

William Chester Minor was a major contributor to the OED.^[16] He became one of the project's most effective volunteers, and came to the attention of Murray, who visited him in January 1891. In 1899, Murray paid compliment to Minor's enormous contributions to the dictionary, stating, "we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone".^[17][18]

In literature and film

The book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (published in America as The Professor and the Madman), by Simon Winchester, was published in 1998 and chronicles both Minor's later life and his contributions to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The movie rights for the book were bought by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions in 1998.^[19] Farhad Safinia directed the film adaptation, called The Professor and the Madman, starring Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor.^[20] The film was released in May 2019.

In 2003, Winchester published a broader history,

The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) is a best-selling novel by Australian author Pip Williams, much of which is set in the scriptorium where Murray and his team worked on the OED.^[21]

Honorary degrees

He was awarded honorary doctoral degrees by nine universities,^{[citation needed]} including:

• LL.D from the University of Glasgow in June 1901.^[22]
• D.Litt. from the University of Oxford in 1914.^[23]

Further reading

• Murray, KM Elisabeth (1977), Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (
  ISBN 0-300-08919-8
  (his granddaughter).
• Ogilvie, Sarah (2012), Words of the World: a global history of the Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press,
  ISBN 9781107021839
  . (later editor on dictionary)
• ISBN 0-19-860702-4
  .
• Murray is also the "professor" referred to in ———, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US: The Professor and the Madman), even though he was never actually granted a professorship by Oxford. Dr. William Chester Minor, a volunteer who worked on the dictionary, was the "madman".

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to James Murray (lexicographer).

Wikisource has original works by or about:
James Murray

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website entry for James Murray
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Murray, Sir James Augustus Henry" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 19 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 40.
• Crime Library biography with photographs
• Broadmoor's Word-Finder (on Minor and Murray)
• Biography at Bikwil.com
• Biography at Denholm Village's website Archived 11 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine
• Blue plaque to Murray on his Banbury Road home
• Murray Scriptorium Letters and papers of James Murray
• Works by James Murray at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about James Murray at Internet Archive