The creation of the Exford English Dictionary is nicely described in “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester.

The book’s cover describes it as “A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” It’s an interesting story about how an obviously insane American Army officer ended up being perhaps the greatest single contributor to the OED. This might be one of the first examples of distributed User Innovation or crowdsourcing.