The Professor and the Madman Unabrdged: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Free Audiobook Download by Simon Winchester

[Amazon.com Audiobook]. Unabridged audiobook of this bestseller, narrated by Elizabeth Winchester, available for download online and locally.

In 1864, James Murray and Dr. William Chester Minor (the future editor of the Oxford English Dictionary) started a quest to catalogue the English language. It's a high-risk mission fraught with danger and fraught with insanity, as the two traveled through war zones on the battlefields of Europe in search of linguistic treasures that had been lost to time. They did not find what they were looking for but found instead an understanding of what they found: language is constantly changing, which means that something as old as royalty can be resurrected if certain words are rediscovered.

[Elizabeth Winchester] is the perfect narrator for this audiobook. I can't say that she does a bad job, but I can say that it is obvious who is narrating when listening to this audiobook. Sometimes it's hard to tell with [Simon Williams], but thankfully [Elizabeth Winchester] uses her voice and style of narration to make the difference clear.

The Professor and the Madman is an amazing book about a man who is set out to find the truth in language. This led him on a journey across Europe and America, interviewing people who are experts in their fields, like lexicographers, teachers, and others.

Professor James Murray, the Oxford English Dictionary editor and compiler, is a self-taught linguist who set out to solve a problem - how to define the new words coming into use by contemporary society. Just as he finishes his marvel of scholarship and realizes that this linguistic wonder may never be known to the public, he has to contend with a murderer and an insane asylum inmate; but eventually, he does succeed in his goal.

Simon Winchester is an award winning author, he has been teaching at Oxford University for over 30 years, teaching a course on the English language. He writes about the insane story of how Dr. James Murray and Dr. William Chester Minor both had to work together to create the dictionary in just 8 months because they were both scholars who were determined to fix their mistakes and make it as perfect as possible.