The Professor and The Madman by Simon Winchester

The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester first published in 1998. The American edition is called The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and was published the same year. It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its most useful early contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon.

The riveting true story of Dr. W.C. Minor--the ingenious but insane American Civil War veteran who contributed more than 10,000 definitions to the Oxford English Dictionary.