It’s the sort of book that mothers and daughters, close relatives and friends give as a present to those they love because they have to share the experience.
It’s the story of Esme, who spends her days from the age of three in the Scriptorium in a garden shed in Oxford with her father and a team of lexicographers (all men), as they compile the first Oxford English Dictionary.
Esme is transfixed by the words and the slips of paper on which the words under consideration are written.
As the years pass and the work continues, she finds a stray slip of paper on the floor containing the word ‘bondmaid’.
She takes it and stores it in a wooden trunk and so begins her collection of words she regards as misplaced, lost or neglected by the dictionary men.
The book got to me on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start.
Certainly, because it’s all about words, and how powerful they can be when their meaning is truly understood and used in the right context.
Just as young Esme had feisty discussions with her dad about words, I too pestered my father as he read the daily paper about such and such a word.
And Esme’s struggles to get along with her peers as she deals with puberty, and later on, where she fits into the bigger scheme of things, stirred up so many memories for me.
The Dictionary of Lost Words contains all of this and is set in a time when the women’s suffrage movement was thriving and the Great War began.
It’s a wonderful, compelling read.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is published by Affirm Press.
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