Henry Bradley

Henry Bradley (3 December 1845 – 23 May 1923) was a British philologist and lexicographer who succeeded James Murray as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Bradley had humble beginnings as a farmer’s son in Nottinghamshire, but by adolescence he was already steeped in several languages of Classical learning, and he is supposed to have learned Russian in only 14 days. Simon Winchester records that some of Bradley's childhood notebooks, discovered by a friend, contained

...lists of words peculiar to the Pentateuch or Isaiah, Hebrew singletons, the form of the verb to be in Algerine, Arabic, bardic and cuneiform lettering, Arabisms and Chaldaisms in the New Testament, with vocabularies that imply he was reading Homer, Virgil, Sallust and the Hebrew Old Testament at the same time. In another group the notes pass from the life of Antar ben Toofail by 'Admar' (apparently of the age of Haroun Arrashid) to the rules of Latin verse, Hakluyt and Hebrew accents, whereupon follow notes on Sir William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart and a translation of parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus...

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