The Professor and the Madman

The story of the film is adapted from real events. The editorial board under the leadership of Dr. James Murray (played by Mel Gibson) is going to edit a new version of the "Oxford English Dictionary". With the level of manpower and technology at the time, it would take a century to complete the compilation of the dictionary. Dr. James Murray pioneered the use of a national participation method, allowing English speakers across the UK to collect word definitions for the dictionary and send them to the editing team by sending letters. In the process of collecting definitions, they discovered that a doctor named W.C. Miner (played by Sean Penn) had contributed more than 10,000 quotations alone, which was a workload that even a professional linguist would find difficult to complete. When the editorial board decided to pay tribute to him, a shocking fact came to light: It turned out that Dr. Miner was a military doctor in the American Civil War. He committed murder because he suffered from schizophrenia and was confined in a mental hospital. He was considered a madman. A professor and a madman, the earliest English dictionary in human history was born in the hands of two very different people.