Reading the Entire Oxford English Dictionary

If you think reading all of Neatorama is a big task (that quite a few of you have actually accomplished - yay, go you!) then take a look at this: Ammon Shea, 37, has just read the entire Oxford English Dictionary!

Ammon Shea, 37, who has been dissecting dictionaries since the age of 10, spent a year absorbing 59 million words, from A to Zyxt - the equivalent of reading a John Grisham novel every day.

Cooped up in the basement of his local library, the removal man from New York would devote up to 10 hours a day painstakingly making his way through all 20 volumes of the OED - helped by cup after cup of very strong coffee. [...]

By the time he reached the 400 pages devoted to words beginning with "un", he said he was "near catatonic, bored out of my mind, and so listless I can't remember why I wanted to read any of this in the first place.

"At this point, telling myself, 'You only have 351 pages of un-words to go', does not seem helpful. I don't quite feel as though I have lost my mind, but it often seems as though it is on vacation somewhere else, just east of sanity."

Link


If you're the slightest bit interested in the OED then you'll love the book "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary".

True story.
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