Sir James Murray(1837–1915)

James Augustus Henry Murray was born at 7 Slitrig Crescent in Hawick in the Scottish Borders on 7 February 1837, the eldest of seven children of Thomas Murray, a Hawick draper and tailor, and Mary Goodall, a domestic servant. The family was Free Kirk, modest in means and unusually serious in habits; James was reading the Greek New Testament by eight, the Hebrew Old Testament by twelve, and had begun work on Romany, Hindustani and Tongan from books borrowed from the Hawick Mechanics' Institute by fourteen. He left school at fourteen because his parents could not afford to keep him there longer, and went out to work.

He taught at the Hawick burgh school as a pupil-teacher from 1854 and became master of Hawick Subscription Academy at twenty in 1857. He moved to London in 1864, took a post at the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, and in 1867 married Ada Ruthven, the partnership that carried the next forty-eight years of his life. He joined the Philological Society of London in 1869, on the strength of papers he had been writing privately on Border dialect, the lowland Scots tongue, and the comparative grammar of the Romance languages. His self-education had by then run through twenty-five working languages and he could read Akkadian cuneiform by 1875.

The Philological Society had since 1858 been planning a comprehensive New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, to record every word in the language with its first written attestation and every shift of meaning thereafter. The work had been begun under Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall and had stalled twice. In 1878 the Society approached Oxford University Press for funding and a permanent editor. In 1879 the Press appointed Murray. He was forty-two, a schoolmaster at Mill Hill in north London where he had moved in 1870, and had no university degree of any kind. He took the editorship on the understanding that the work would occupy him for ten years, that the Press would pay him a salary, and that he would build a corrugated-iron working shed, which he called the Scriptorium, on the lawn of his Mill Hill house. The first fascicle, A to Ant, appeared in 1884. The work took not ten years but thirty-six.

By 1885 Murray had moved with his family to 78 Banbury Road in Oxford and built a second, larger Scriptorium in the garden there, where the fifty-strong editorial staff and the slips contributed by the eight hundred volunteer readers on three continents were sorted and filed. He worked at the Scriptorium twelve hours a day, six days a week, in two overcoats and fingerless gloves through the Oxford winters, his daughters reading aloud from the slips while he wrote the definitions. He answered four hundred letters a week from readers proposing additions and corrections to entries that had been published a decade earlier. He was knighted in 1908. He saw four of the ten original volumes through the press before his death; the W volume was completed by his successor Henry Bradley in 1928. The whole dictionary was finished thirteen years after he died. The single editorial sensibility of the entire OED is substantially his.

He died at 78 Banbury Road on 26 July 1915, in his seventy-ninth year, working on the entry for Turn-Twist with the manuscript on his bed. The 1916 fascicle was dedicated to him by his successors; the W volume, published in 1928, named him on its title page as the dictionary's first editor. He is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery in north Oxford, in a plot whose simple grey stone gives his name and dates and the single phrase Lexicographer. The Murray name today carries his memory as the man whose unfunded autodidact reading in a Hawick draper's cottage in the 1840s became the largest single act of English-language scholarship of the modern era. The Oxford English Dictionary, in its second edition of twenty volumes (1989) and its continuing third edition, runs from the foundation he laid.