The Oxford English Dictionary was made from slips of paper. Volunteer readers copied out a sentence using a word, wrote above it the word, date, author, title and exact place, and posted the slip to the editors, who sorted millions of them and wrote each definition from that evidence. The first edition, issued in parts from 1884 to 1928, printed almost two million of those quotations (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-c).
This account, published by EdCitation, draws on the OED's own pages, Oxford's independent Examining the OED project, the Broadmoor archive and the style guides, all read on 24 September 2026. Where the records disagree, William Chester Minor's story included, we say so.
Every OED entry is a small reference list, which is why this story belongs on a citation site. For a paper on it, three free EdCitation tools do the source work: Find sources for articles on the dictionary's history, Cite a source for references taken from publishers' records, and Verify references to confirm each entry on your list is real. The last sections show them at work on the OED.
How did the Oxford English Dictionary begin?
As a hunt for missing words. In 1857 the Philological Society of London set up a committee to collect words the dictionaries had not registered (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-b). Its circular of July 1857 asked volunteers each to take a book and copy out quotations for such words, and several dozen came forward (Gilliver, 2012).
On 7 January 1858 the Society resolved to make a new dictionary instead, and its Proposal of 1859 set the rule that made a reading programme necessary: a dictionary should hold "every word occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate", and the lexicographer is no "arbiter of style" (Philological Society, 1859, p. 2). Evidence, not taste, would decide. Johnson had also defined from quotations in 1755, as our short history of English recounts.
Then the project nearly died. Herbert Coleridge, the first editor, forecast in 1860 that the first part would appear "in about two years", and died in 1861 aged 31. Under Frederick Furnivall the readers drifted away, and in 1868 the Athenaeum reported a general belief that the work would never be carried out (Brewer, 2025b).
What did James Murray's 1879 appeal ask readers to do?
To read books and send in quotations: a thousand readers, within three years. Oxford University Press agreed in 1879 to publish and pay for the dictionary, with James Murray, president of the Philological Society, as editor (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-b). Within weeks he issued An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public, which ran to three editions (Gilliver, 2012). "A thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for," it said; a year later Murray reported 754 (Brewer, 2025e). He also issued lists of "wants", words lacking evidence, from October 1879 until at least 1896 (Gilliver, 2012).
How a reader wrote a slip
Murray's printed directions, reproduced by Brewer (2025a), set the method. In our words:
- Write on a half-sheet of notepaper, with the word as a catchword in the top corner.
- Give the date of the book, the author, a short title and "an exact reference", good enough for anyone to find the passage again.
- In prose, give volume, chapter and page, and name the edition if it is not the first; in verse or a play, the line or the act and scene.
- Copy spelling and capitals exactly, with enough of the passage to show the meaning.
- Quote every rare, new or odd word, and as many ordinary words as you can.
The model was J. S. Mill's Logic, headed 1849, with book, chapter, section, page and "(ed. 1856)". Readers still favoured the unusual: Murray was often short of everyday examples and wrote some himself, marked Mod. (Brewer, 2025a).
Where the slips went
Into piles, then pigeonholes. An 1880 account found Murray at Mill Hill in an iron room 32 feet by 16 holding 2,500,000 slips, which two assistants were still sorting; by 1899 he reckoned five-sixths of the quotations being printed had been gathered under his own supervision since 1879 (Brewer, 2025b). In 1885 he moved to 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, where a garden Scriptorium was lined with pigeon-holed slips, "the evidential basis of all the entries" (Brewer, 2025d). His eleven children were paid pocket money to sort them (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-c). By 1901 Murray put the collection at about five million quotations (Brewer, 2025b).
Who were the OED's volunteer readers?
More people than any one list names. The Appendix to the first volume, in 1888, named over 300 main readers (Brewer, 2025e); in 1892 Murray spoke of "our 1500 readers"; and the OED says the first edition's contributors run into four figures (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-a).
| Reader | Who they were | Credited with |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas Austin | Son of an agricultural labourer; had been an Oxford college servant | 165,000 quotations by 1888 |
| Thomas Brushfield | Physician and antiquarian | 50,000 by 1888; over 70,000 by 1899 |
| Job Pierson | Presbyterian minister, Ionia, Michigan | 46,000 by 1888 |
| Harold Murray | The editor's eldest son | 27,000 by 1888 |
| W. C. Minor | American former army surgeon, a patient at Broadmoor | 5,000 to 8,000 by 1888 |
| Marghanita Laski | Novelist and broadcaster, reading for the 1972 to 1986 Supplement | About 250,000 by 1986 |
Minor and Laski come from Brewer (2025c), the rest from the OED's contributors page. Brewer assumes the readers were people of independent means, whose tastes shaped what the dictionary quoted; the OED's note on Austin, probably the most prolific, describes a labourer's son.
Who was William Chester Minor?
An American army surgeon who became one of the dictionary's most valued readers while detained at Broadmoor, the criminal lunatic asylum in Berkshire. The Broadmoor archive's account gives these facts (Berkshire Record Office, 2009). Minor was born in June 1834 in Ceylon to American missionary parents, qualified in medicine at Yale in 1863 and served as a Union Army surgeon. After the war the army judged him mentally ill and sent him to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington; in 1871 he left the army for London.
In February 1872, in Lambeth, believing himself pursued, he shot and killed George Merrett, a man walking to work at a brewery. The Surrey Assizes found him "not guilty but insane", and he reached Broadmoor on 17 April 1872. His family's allowance paid for books, which filled a second room, and reading was encouraged as part of his treatment; he answered Murray's appeal.
The 1888 Preface credited him with 5,000 to 8,000 quotations; he sent many more until ill health stopped him in 1902, 12,000 in 1899 alone, drawn from his own rare books (Brewer, 2025c). He concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and kept word indexes so he could supply the words the editors were then working on (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-a). Given a conditional discharge in April 1910, he was taken back to the United States and stayed in hospital care until he died in Hartford, Connecticut, on 26 March 1920 (Berkshire Record Office, 2009).
What is disputed about Minor's story
- The first meeting. The famous scene, in which Murray reaches Broadmoor expecting a fellow scholar and learns the truth on arrival, goes back to two articles by an American journalist in 1915. Gross (1998), reviewing Simon Winchester's 1998 book, calls it "a complete myth": Murray had been told years before they met. The archive dates their first meeting to early 1891, a lunch at the superintendent's house. A 2023 museum article still tells the arrival story (Mahr, 2023).
- The count. Mahr (2023) credits Minor with "over 10,000" entries and calls him the largest contributor. Elisabeth Murray's biography, as Brewer (2025c) quotes it, says only Furnivall's total exceeded his, yet Austin had 165,000 by 1888. No source we read gives Minor's final total, so we give none.
- Small facts. The archive gives his birth as 1834, the OED's page 1835; the archive spells the victim's name Merrett, Gross Merritt.
How long did the OED take, and what came after?
Forty-four years from first part to last, against Murray's estimate of ten years for the whole. A to Ant appeared on 29 January 1884 and the final part on 19 April 1928 (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-b). Murray died in 1915, thirteen years before the end.
The OED's own pages count the result differently: ten volumes and over 250,000 main entries on its history page, 12 volumes and 414,825 words defined on its milestones page (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-b, n.d.-c). Burchfield's Supplement (1972 to 1986) recruited readers again; the second edition of 1989 merged everything into 20 volumes with more than 2.4 million quotations; revision for a third edition began in 1993, and since 2000 it has been online, updated every three months.
Why is an OED entry like a reference list?
Because each definition rests on dated quotations whose sources are named, so anyone can go back and check them, which is the promise a reference list makes. Checking was a job in itself: Frederick Sweatman, on Murray's staff from 1890, became expert at standardising quotation references and verifying quotations in the Bodleian Library (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-a).
The dictionary also admitted its limits. Murray wrote in 1884 that the editors could not "exhaust the ground, or attain to absolute certainty" (Brewer, 2025b), and each entry now shows its history: scriptorium, the name of Murray's shed, has evidence from 1695, was revised in June 2018 and last modified in June 2026 (Oxford University Press, n.d.). A student's list makes the same bargain, as our guide to checking that a reference exists explains.
How do you cite an OED entry in APA, MLA or Chicago?
Each style has its pattern, and OED entries now carry a permanent DOI and a Cite button. We gave the DOI for scriptorium to EdCitation's Cite a source on 24 September 2026, and again on 27 September 2026. From Crossref's record it returned, in APA 7:
Oxford University Press. (2023). Scriptorium, n. In Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3383765628
The entry, the link and the publisher as author are as APA asks, but APA uses n.d. with a retrieval date for a dictionary, because entries change (American Psychological Association, 2020). The 2023 is Crossref's, not the entry's. Corrected:
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Scriptorium, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 24, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3383765628
In the text: (Oxford University Press, n.d.).
| Style | What the style's own page shows | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| MLA 9 | Headword with its part of speech capitalised, as in "Heavy, Adj. (1) and N.", then the dictionary, publisher and date (Modern Language Association, 2016, written for MLA 8) | Cite a source gave "Scriptorium, n." and 2023: write "N." and the entry's own date, June 2026 in the OED's Cite box |
| Chicago 18 | A major dictionary normally goes in a note, not the bibliography (University of Chicago Press, n.d.) | EdCitation builds author-date lists, not notes: ask whether the OED belongs in yours |
| Vancouver | Dictionary title first, then the entry, as in NLM's "Merriam-Webster medical dictionary [Internet]" then "Cloning" (Patrias, 2007) | Cite a source put the headword first: reverse them |
We did not read Cite Them Right (a subscription) or IEEE's guide on dictionaries, so for Harvard and IEEE follow your department.
What Verify references said
We pasted four references into Verify references: Gilliver's 2016 history, Elisabeth Murray's 1977 biography of her grandfather, Winchester's 1998 book and the corrected APA entry. All four came back verified, the entry with this reason:
The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches.
The n.d. and the retrieval date were read as what they are, no year and the day the entry was read. Open the DOI all the same, and confirm the headword you quote.
Where can you research the OED's history?
In the scholarship, the books and the OED's own pages, and EdCitation is the best tool for turning them into references, because every reference it gives is looked up in a record, never written. On this subject that matters: the popular version of Minor's story has drifted from its sources, while a reference taken from a record carries the source's own details.
- Look for articles with EdCitation's Find sources, free, which covers about 300 million published works and narrows them by kind of source, years and open access. On 24 September 2026, "Oxford English Dictionary volunteer readers quotations" returned 2,613,762 results, led by Peter Gilliver's 2015 article "The Quotation Collectors".
- Collect the books in the Library, whose catalogue of textbooks and scholarly books narrows by discipline, kind, language and year. Caught in the Web of Words came first for its title, and Sarah Ogilvie's The Dictionary People (2023) for its title with the author's surname; Gilliver's history came straight up from its ISBN, 9780199283620, though sixth for its title. All three were books to buy or find in a nearby library. Searching it and keeping books in My Books needs only a free account; Max, at $24 a month, opens more than 5 million books for reading in full or borrowing (pricing).
- Build each reference in Cite a source, free in all six of its styles, which also screens every source for retraction. From Gilliver's ISBN the catalogue record dropped "The" from the book's title; from the DOI it came back whole, and the APA entry sets it in sentence case, The making of the Oxford English Dictionary, keeping the dictionary's name.
- Put the whole list through Verify references before you hand it in; it is free and needs no account. None of these tools writes a word of your paper.
Quick questions
Who was William Chester Minor?
An American former army surgeon who, detained at Broadmoor after a killing in 1872 for which a court found him "not guilty but insane", became one of the OED's most valued volunteer readers, sending quotations until 1902.
How many quotations did William Chester Minor send?
The 1888 Preface credited him with 5,000 to 8,000, and he sent 12,000 in 1899 alone. No record we read gives his final total.
How many volunteers worked on the Oxford English Dictionary?
The 1888 Appendix named over 300 main readers, Murray spoke of 1,500 in 1892, and the OED says the first edition's contributors run into four figures.
How do I cite the Oxford English Dictionary in APA 7?
Name Oxford University Press as author, then n.d., the headword, "In Oxford English Dictionary", a retrieval date and the DOI. Paste the entry's DOI into EdCitation's Cite a source, free, then set the author and date as shown above.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2020). Dictionary entry references. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/dictionary-entry-references
- Berkshire Record Office. (2009). William Chester Minor (1834–1920). The Royal Berkshire Archives. https://www.royalberkshirearchives.org.uk/storage/app/media/pdfs/William-Chester-Minor.pdf
- Brewer, C. (2025a, August 6). Directions to readers 1879. Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/historical-background/oed1s-compilation/directions-to-readers/
- Brewer, C. (2025b, August 1). Early progress. Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/quotations/oed1-quotation-collection/early-progress/
- Brewer, C. (2025c, August 6). Individual readers. Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/quotations/reading-and-readers/individuals/
- Brewer, C. (2025d, August 6). Murray in his scriptorium. Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/photos/oed1-up-to-1928/murray-in-his-scriptorium/
- Brewer, C. (2025e, August 1). Reading and readers. Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/quotations/reading-and-readers/
- Gilliver, P. (2012, October 4). 'Your dictionary needs you': A brief history of the OED's appeals to the public. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/information/using-the-oed/contributing-to-the-oed/your-dictionary-needs-you-a-brief-history-of-the-oeds-appeals-to-the-public/
- Gilliver, P. (2016). The making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283620.001.0001
- Gross, J. (1998, September 24). The case of the loony lexicographer [Review of the book The professor and the madman, by S. Winchester]. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/09/24/the-case-of-the-loony-lexicographer/
- Mahr, M. (2023, November 13). The doctor and the dictionary. National Museum of Civil War Medicine. https://www.civilwarmed.org/the-doctor-and-the-dictionary/
- Modern Language Association. (2016, November 3). How do I cite a term in an online or print dictionary that lists several numbered definitions? MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/term-with-numbered-definitions/
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.-a). Contributors to the OED. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the-oed/contributors-to-the-oed/
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.-b). Dictionary milestones. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the-oed/dictionary-milestones/
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.-c). History of the OED. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the-oed/
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Scriptorium, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 24, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3383765628
- Patrias, K. (2007). Books and other individual titles on the Internet (D. Wendling, Ed.; updated 2015). In Citing medicine: The NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers (2nd ed., chap. 22). National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7269/
- Philological Society. (1859). Proposal for the publication of a new English dictionary by the Philological Society. Trübner. Facsimile at https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/historical-background/oed1s-compilation/1859-proposal/
- University of Chicago Press. (n.d.). Citation, documentation of sources [Q&A]. The Chicago Manual of Style Online. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Documentation/faq0263.html