One of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary worked not from a university office but from a cell in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. This episode follows Dr. William Chester Minor from his birth in Ceylon to missionary parents, through Yale medical school where he assisted on the 1864 revision of Webster’s dictionary, into the horrors of Civil War surgery, and examines why the famous story of him branding a deserter at the Battle of the Wilderness is almost certainly fiction.

The conversation traces his post-war paranoia, his stay at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the move to London that ended on February 17, 1872 when he shot and killed brewery worker George Merrett, and the insanity verdict that sent him to Broadmoor. There, with an army pension and a cell full of antiquarian books, he built his own cross-referenced word index and supplied editor James Murray with thousands of dated quotations, 12,000 in 1899 alone, while the victim’s widow Eliza Merrett brought him more books. It closes with his worsening delusions, the self-mutilation carried out with his page-cutting knife, and his release by Home Secretary Winston Churchill in 1910.

• Biographical retrofitting: why the Civil War branding story does not match the records
• Pattern recognition as both lexicographical genius and paranoid illness
• The killing of George Merrett and how Victorian class shaped life inside Broadmoor
• Minor’s reverse method of indexing every word before Oxford ever asked
• Eliza Merrett’s visits, Murray’s discovery of his star contributor, and Churchill’s release order