The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a non-fiction history book by British writer Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998.

It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.

The book tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, William Chester Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon.

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 enlisted the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.

A film adaptation of the book, starring Mel Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor and directed by Farhad Safinia under the pseudonym P. B. Shemran,[6] was released in 2019 with the title The Professor and the Madman.