The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel

Pip Williams

Apr 2021 · Sold by Ballantine Books

About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD

Ratings and reviews

I received a free ARC of this excellent debut historical novel from Netgalley, Pip Williams, and Affirm Press. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Pip Williams writes a warm, enveloping story emphasizing the importance of words - their definitions, their emotional cost, their versatility. Her characters are all well presented, very human, some flawed, very like the people you might know from your neighborhood. This is a book I will share with my nieces and nephews, the parents of our next generation. Never have words been more important than they are today. Our story begins in Oxford, England in 1887. Motherless Esme grew up spending her afternoons quietly beneath the table in the Scriptorium, a converted tool shed in the back garden of the first editor, Dr. James Murray, of the Oxford Dictionary, at his home known as Sunnyside, where her father and his co-workers spent their time collecting and defining words for a proposed book, a collection of English words and their various definitions to be published as the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Many people around the world were chosen to submit words for this venture; words submitted by mail with a quote of the word used in a sentence and written on a paper trimmed to 4" x 6". Words that had never appeared in print were discarded. As duplicate words were submitted with different quotes, they were all pinned into a single grouping to be added to as submissions came in. Duplicates were tossed, as were submissions without an authentic published use of the word. As a child Esme 'collected' cards from beneath the table in the Scriptorium and stored them in her friend Lizzy's room in Sunnyside, in a box under her bed. Only when it was discovered that a word was completely missing in the first edition of the dictionary, 'bondmaid', which had been submitted by one of the co-workers and should have been there, was her hobby exposed, though as a child she had no way of distinguishing which slips dropped under the sorting table were intentional discards from those rejected or simply lost. It brings to life for her the fact that many words used every day, especially those used by women and the poor, would never be in the 'official' dictionary. And thus began her serious collection of lost words. As an adult, by day she worked with her father and his co-workers verifying quotes and sorting the mail, but her weekends were spent wandering the markets and byways of town and jotting down words saved for her by her acquaintances and those of her friend Lizzy, a helpmate a year or two older than she who worked as a domestic in the house next door to the Scriptorium. Thus was begun the Dictionary of Lost Words with quotes from their submitters, the flower seller or fish wife, the domestic or working girl. I wish I had read the Afterword and Timeline, both located at the end of the novel before I read the Dictionary of Lost Words. The very much add to the relevance of The Dictionary of Lost words. Pip Williams has published a memoir, but this is her first novel.

About the author

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published in Australia to wide acclaim. Based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, The Dictionary of Lost Words is her first novel.