James Murray (lexicographer)
James Augustus Henry Murray (
February 7,
1837-
July 26,
1915) was a
Scottish lexicographer and
philologist. He was the primary editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary from
1879 until his death.
Sir James Murray was born 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.
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.
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 MÅ"so-
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.
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.
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.
Main article: Oxford English Dictionary
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. It would be a massive project, which required somebody with Murray's knowledge and single-minded determination.
On
1 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. 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.
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 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.
|
The house at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, erstwhile residence of James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Note the post box in front of the house. |
In the summer of 1884, Murray and his family moved to a large house on the Banbury Road in north 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.
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.
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).
Murray is the "professor" referred to in Winchester's 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".
*
Crime Library biography with photographs*
Boadmoor's Word-Finder (on Minor and Murray)*
Free ebook of James Murray at
Project Gutenberg*http://www.bikwil.com/Vintage08/James-Murray.html
