Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman tells the story of a genius and an inmate's collaboration on what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1879, James B. Murray was retained by the Philological Society of London to create The Oxford English Dictionary. Today, it has more than half a million entries in 23 very substantial volumes. But in 1884, after five years of work, Murray had only reached the word "ant."

When he began receiving excellent submissions from W.C. Minor, an American doctor living in England, Murray was delighted to accept them. Only later did he learn the letters were being sent from a hospital for the criminally insane where Minor had been confined since 1872. Seems he was imprisoned there after committing a random murder in London.

Who knew that dictionaries had such a bloody history? Regardless of their origins, dictionaries are both influential and indispensable.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman invasion of England in 1066, one of the turning points in the history of the English langauge.

Influential? It's no accident that the first American dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary, was created by Noah Webster, a strong supporter of the American Revolution. He knew that standardizing a distinct American English would bolster the new country's status as an independent nation.

Indispensable? Dictionaries are indispensable thanks to the wide variety of information they offer. They're so indispensable, in fact, that this and every page of a Beyond Books program includes a link to an online dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

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