How They Crowd-Sourced the Oxford English Dictionary

Getting other people to do your work for you, and even raising money from crowds, is a popular activity in the Internet Age. But the strategy goes back over 100 years – although without the benefit of cheap and rapid communication.

The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language was built by crowd sourcing, back in the nineteenth century. The tale is told in a very readable book titled The Professor and the Madman: a Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. It tells the remarkable history of the project, and its most remarkable — and prolific — contributor, an American doctor named William C. Minor.

The work of compiling the Oxford Dictionary started in 1878, took 70 years to finish, and eventually produced an inventory of 414,825 precise definitions.

The crowd sourcing method developed by the project's mastermind, Professor James Murray, involved asking everyone willing to contribute to scour through all the books they owned, write down all the words beginning with their assigned alphabetical letter or sequence of letters, and write a definition for each one on a separate slip of paper. Thousands of contributors mailed in their definitions from all over England.

Dr. Minor, a surgeon who had served in the Civil War and emigrated to England, contributed over 10,000 entries. Murray repeatedly invited him to visit Oxford to receive a commendation for his work, but Minor never went there.

Finally, in 1896, Murray decided to pay a surprise visit to Minor, in the town of Crowthorne, 50 miles north of Oxford. Arriving by train at the address he'd been given, he was astonished to find Minor locked up in Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane.

It seems that Minor had experienced a psychotic episode shortly after coming to England, shooting to death a complete stranger on the street in London. He was incarcerated at Broadmoor for the rest of his life, mentally unstable but intellectually at the top of his game. In consideration of his professional status and considerable personal wealth, he was comfortably housed in a suite of rooms, with his personal effects and his considerable collection of books.

^{Dr. Karl Albrecht is an executive management consultant, coach, futurist, lecturer, and author of more than 20 books on professional achievement, organizational performance, and business strategy. His books Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success, Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense, and his Mindex Thinking Style Profile are used in business and education. Originally a physicist, and having served as a military intelligence officer and business executive, he now consults, lectures, and writes about whatever he thinks would be fun: www.KarlAlbrecht.com}