“Some words are more important than others—I learned this growing up in the Scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.”
If you enjoy words and language, you will love The Dictionary of Lost Words. This fascinating book is the debut novel by author, Pip Williams. Ms. Williams took the actual story of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary and weaved it into this incredible novel. The book focuses on a young motherless girl, Esme, who goes to work at the Scriptorium with her father, who is part of the team that is writing the original the Oxford English Dictionary. Esme sits quietly under her father’s desk while the men work on their scripts. Each word that they consider including in the dictionary must be defined, must be in a sentence that shows its context and list the book in which it was found. One day a script falls on the floor next to Esme that contains the word bondmaid. Esme quickly puts it in her pocket. Bondmaid is the first of the “lost words.”
The book is divided into parts that reflect the words in the dictionary worked on in those years. For instance, Part I is 1887-1896: Batten-Distrustful. The years also follow the life of Esme and her father. The Author’s Note at the end of the book goes into the research that Ms. Williams did to write this book. She even visited the Oxford University Press where the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary are held and was able to peruse them.
As I was reading this book, I had to chuckle to myself when I remembered an activity I did in a college class when I was a freshman. Our professor asked us to write down three things we would take with us on a deserted island. I have no idea what I wrote, but I remember that one of his items was the Oxford English Dictionary. At the time I was 18 and clueless about that particular dictionary. So, he explained that the dictionary not only included every word in the English language, but also contained the history of each word. Since it was made up of 12 volumes, he said that he could easily spend the rest of his life on the island reading that dictionary. To be honest, I thought at the time, that this was a bit odd. Who would want to spend their life reading a dictionary? But here I am, many years later appreciating a book about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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