Murray, JAMES A. H.

Murray, JAMES A. H., philologist, was born at Denholm, Roxburghshire, in 1837, received his elementary education at Minto school, removed to Hawick, and was appointed assistant-teacher in the parish school there, and afterwards master of a subscription academy. He next removed to London, filling the post of foreign correspondent in the Oriental Bank for some years; he afterwards became senior assistant-master at Mill Hill school. Dr Murray has been twice president of the Philological Society (1879-80), is a graduate of London University, and LL.D. of Edinburgh University. His work on the Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873) established his reputation as a philologist. He is familiar with almost all the European languages and a large number of oriental tongues. The great work of his life, the editorship of the Philological Society's New English Dictionary, issued by the Clarendon Press, was begun while at Mill Hill (1879), an iron building in his garden there being utilised for the assortment of the two tons of material to which he fell heir from his predecessors in the editorship, Herbert Coleridge and Dr Furnivall. This work has been continued at Oxford, where Dr Murray has, with a staff of assistants, devoted his whole attention to the task. Dr Murray has fought his way to the front rank as an authority in the history and derivation of words, and his great English Dictionary is the most thorough and important work of the kind ever undertaken in Britain. A civil list pension of £270 per annum was conferred upon him in 1884.