SOURCE: “The Making of a Dictionary: James A H Murray,” in The Indexer, Vol. 20, No. 2, October, 1996, pp. 78-80.

In the following essay, Bell recounts Murray's efforts to compile and publish the Oxford English Dictionary.

Caught in the web of words: James Murray and the Oxford English dictionary, K M Elisabeth Murray's biography of her grandfather (Murray 1977), was reviewed by The Times as describing ‘how a largely self-educated boy from a small village in Scotland entered the world of scholarship and became the first editor of the Oxford English dictionary, and a lexicographer greater by far than Dr Johnson’. It makes fascinating reading, especially for indexers, who likewise deal with lists of words alphabetically ordered and glossed—but individually on so much smaller a scale, and with so much latter-day technological assistance. ‘A magnificent story of a magnificent man', Anthony Burgess called it.

Murray was born in 1837 in Denholm...