 Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and he had taught in schools and worked in banking.Faced with the enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray had turned to an early form of crowdsourcing (a word not coined until the 21st century)—enlisting the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.A journalist with three decades of experience, and the author of a dozen travel-inspired books, Winchester's initial proposal to write a book about an obscure lexicographer was originally met with rejection.