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William Chester Minor (W. C. Minor) was an American surgeon who made many scholarly contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary while confined to a lunatic asylum.
In 1871 he went to the UK settling in the slum of Lambeth, in London where once again he took up a dissolute life. Haunted by his paranoia, he fatally shot a man named George Merrett, who Minor mistakenly believed had broken into his room, on February 17, 1872. After a pre-trial period spent in London's Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and incarcerated in the asylum at Broadmoor in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire.
He devoted most of the remainder of his life to the Oxford English Dictionary, systematically reading through his library, and compiling lists of the occurrence of words. These he kept current with the words needed in the volume being worked on at the time. As his lists grew, he was able to supply quotations on demand for a particular word.
He died in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut.
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