[4] A precocious child with a voracious appetite for learning, he left school at fourteen because his parents were not able to afford to pay the fees to continue his education.

Once there, Murray took an administrative job with the Chartered Bank of India while continuing in his spare time to pursue his many and varied academic interests.

Their best man was his friend Alexander Graham Bell,[6] who had earlier received instruction from Murray in elementary electricity, and often referred to him as "the grandfather of the telephone".

Some idea of the depth and range of his linguistic erudition may be gained from a letter of application he wrote to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, in which he claimed an 'intimate acquaintance' with Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Latin, and 'to a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects'.

He had 'sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read and cite the Old Testament and Peshito' and to a lesser degree he knew Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic, and Phoenician.

[12] In preparation for the work ahead, Murray built a corrugated-iron shed in the grounds of Mill Hill School, called the Scriptorium, to house his small team of assistants as well as the flood of slips (bearing quotations illustrating the use of words to be defined in the dictionary) which started to flow in as a result of his appeal[clarification needed].

Murray became president of the Oxford Philatelic Society, making use of the substantial collection of postage stamps he received from his many readers around the world.

Despite his devotion to the dictionary, which was recognized by his knighthood in 1908,[14] Murray remained a relative outsider in Oxford, never fully taking part in university academic and Senior Common Room life.

[19] Farhad Safinia directed the film adaptation, called The Professor and the Madman, starring Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor.

The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) is a best-selling novel by Australian author Pip Williams, much of which is set in the scriptorium where Murray and his team worked on the OED.