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The Dictionary of Lost Words
In this historical novel, Esme spends her childhood in Oxford where her father is a lexicographer helping create the first Oxford English Dictionary. As the team of men debate which words should be included or omitted, Esme gathers the discarded words and discovers that words associated with women are often left out. While she publicly works on the Oxford English Dictionary, she secretly starts another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. With a backdrop of the suffrage movement and looming war, this inventive story explores the power of words and what we all lose when history is only recorded by men.
About the Book
“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
WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD • “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 Wordsreveals 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.
Other books in the "8 books about word nerds"
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