It is difficult to imagine today that until the 19th century, English did not have a complete dictionary. The movie is an adaptation of the 1998 bestselling book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by the globe-trotting journalist Simon Winchester. On May 10, the story of these two men will play out on the silver screen, in a film titled The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn. The story of these two men - James Murray and Dr William Chester Minor - are intertwined with the history of the OED, and together tell a compelling story of scholarship, violence, madness, poverty and an indelible love for words and their history. It took roughly 70 years for the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary to be assembled, and those years saw the meeting of two men who, on the face of it, looked quite similar, but had lived vastly different lives. Gibson plays the former schoolteacher who edited the first edition Penn is the mentally unstable former army surgeon who helped him put it together.(Vertical Entertainment) Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in a still from The Professor and the Madman. But the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) can be described as anything but quiet, and was certainly not mundane. Dictionaries themselves conjure up images of quiet reflection, of someone stooped over the tomes, magnifying glass in hand, pondering over a particular word and the variegated historical journey it must have had.
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