The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

I heard about this book from the Modern Mrs. Darcy blog, where she listed some good audiobooks. I was interested in it because I loved getting to know the OED a little bit when I was in college. It's absolutely amazing to see how much goes into every entry about every word. Not just definitions, but actual quotes showing how and when the words were used and when they first entered the language. I was fascinated by it, and I loved the idea of learning about how the book was put together. This book gave a lot of information about that, but it also focused a lot on one of the contributors to the dictionary: William Chester Minor, who was an insane man being held in an asylum in England after he killed a man. I'd say this book was more about him than it was about the dictionary--kind of a biography of Minor with more asides about the dictionary and Murray, who was the "professor" in charge of the dictionary (at least for part of it--it took 70 years to complete so he died before it was finished). And I was kind of disappointed about that--I didn't feel like the story of Minor and Murray was worth spending most of the book on. It would have been great to have it be maybe split halfway between the personal story and more information about the making of the dictionary. I'm sure there was some exciting dramas that must have happened while adding specific words, etc., and that's probably what Minor and Murray would have been more interested in talking about than themselves. But it was still a pretty good audiobook--the narrator's (and author's) voice was so supremely upper-class British that it was perfect for this story about the Oxford English Dictionary.