Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon remains unfinished decades after his death

Evidence

By 1876, the year of his death, Lane had reached fa, the twentieth letter of the twenty-eight-letter alphabet. Although Lane had received an honorary degree from Leiden in the previous year, he had spent his life researching and publishing outside the university system. To this day his great dictionary remains incomplete. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 293

Categorization

• CANDY: A single scholar reached letter 20 of 28 across a whole lifetime spent outside academia — a neat bar-tidbit about scholarly obsession.