The Dictionary of Lost Words

Author : Pip Williams

Genre : Historical Fiction

Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this story beginning in May, 1887 until 1928 when it’s completed..

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard 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. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and 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.