William Chester Minor, American surgeon and lexicographer (b. 1834)
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor (June 22, 1834 – March 26, 1920), was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient and lexicographical researcher. After serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he moved to England. Affected by paranoid delusions, he was committed to a secure British psychiatric hospital from 1872 to 1910 after he shot a man whom he believed to have broken into his room.

While incarcerated, Minor became an important contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary: he was one of the project's most effective volunteers, reading through his large personal library of antiquarian books and compiling quotations that illustrated the way particular words were used. Responding to protests about Minor's treatment, in 1910, Winston Churchill, then serving as Home Secretary, ordered Minor's deportation to the United States. He was hospitalized and treated in Connecticut, where he died in 1920.