The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

If you, like me, are a logophile, which is to say a lover of words, and also find great joy in the endless possibilities that words offer, you will likely relish this Pip Williams offering. With her outstanding lyrical prose and effortless manipulation of words, one cannot help but be swept away by such penmanship and etymological mastery.

Owing to my love of books and words, The Dictionary of Lost Words had me feeling like a kid who’d just won a golden ticket and was getting a tour of a chocolate factory.

The premise – the writing of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – does not exactly shout ‘exhilarating’, but let me assure you, it is. Trust me, you will be swept along by this narrative about the collection of words, the primitive methods that applied, the dedication of the people involved, the role of women in the compilation of scripts, editing of proofs and their standing in society at the time, the accompanying dramas and love stories, the hardships of World War I, and so much more.

When the word ‘bondmaid’ is discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary in 1901, a crisis erupts. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is a little motherless girl who grows up under the sorting table of the ‘Scriptorium’, where her father is a lexicographer. One day a slip of paper falls off the table and lands in her hand and she decides to hide it in an old wooden case under the bed of her friend and carer, Lizzie, in the servant quarters of the big house.

Esme then begins to collect all the other misplaced, discarded and overlooked words from the Scriptorium, but also words from the women in the market, the kitchens of the manor houses and injured soldiers in hospitals and, ultimately, she compiles her own secret trove of words brimming with treasures to help her make sense of the world.

It soon becomes clear that the historical disregard of the role of women in society filtered through even to the choices of words that would be allowed in the dictionary: an area, like every other academic field, presided over by men. As she grows up, Esme realises that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set during the time when the women’s suffrage movement was taking off and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of those hidden words that represent the lives and roles of women, which were refused to be recognised in the history – and the dictionary – as written by men. It is a delightful, riotous and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world and our personal experiences.