The story of the film is based on a true event. The editorial board led by Dr. James Murray (played by MEL Gibson) was going to edit a new version of [Expand All]
The story of the film is based on a true event. Under the leadership of Dr. James Murray (played by MEL Gibson), the editorial board was to edit a new version of the Oxford English Dictionary. With the human and technological level at that time, it would take a century to complete the compilation of the dictionary. Dr. James Murray innovatively adopted a method of public participation. Have all English speakers in the UK collect the definitions of entries for the dictionary together and send them to the compilation team by mail. During the process of collecting definitions, they discovered that a doctor named W.C. Meiner (played by Sean Penn) had contributed over ten thousand quotations all by himself. This is a workload that even a professional linguist would find difficult to complete. When the editorial board decided to pay tribute to him, a shocking fact was exposed: It turned out that Dr. Mina was a military doctor in the American Civil War. Due to his schizophrenia, he was convicted of murder and confined in a mental hospital. He was regarded as a lunatic. The earliest English dictionary in human history was thus born in the hands of two completely different people: a professor and a madman.[Collapse]
