The Dictionary of Lost Words

MarilynW

Rating: really liked it

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams  

It never occurred to me all that went into compiling early dictionaries. Male scholars worked for decades to compile the words and definitions to go into the first Oxford English Dictionary, words and definitions whose final acceptance was at the discretion of the editors of the volumes. This story describes the garden shed in Oxford where real life lexicographer, James Murray, built a Scriptorium, a shed behind his house, where he and his team of scholars could work on amassing words and definitions. Murray and his wife had eleven children who were very involved in Murray's work. 

The fictional part of this story concerns, Esme, whose father is widowed at Esme's birth. Esme's father is a member of Murphy's team and he brings Esme to work with him each day. As a youngster, Esme spends time under the big table of the workers and often gathers discarded word slips and hides them away in a chest in the room of house servant Lizzie. Lizzie, although just eight years older than Esme, is a combination of mother, companion, and maid to Esme, especially once Esme is banished from the Scriptorium for interfering with the work there. 

Later, an unofficial dictionary is compiled of all the words that Esme gathers from the discards of the Scriptorium, and from women and poor people of Oxford and surrounding areas. Words that wouldn't be considered for the Oxford English Dictionary because they are just spoken, not written (since they are used by people who would never learn to write) and words that are considered too crude or offensive to be included in the dictionary. The means to this dictionary being created is one of my favorite parts of the story and concerns Gareth, another of my favorite characters, along with Lizzie. Towards the end of the book, Gareth writes one of the saddest letters I've ever read. 

I thought the work of the lexicographers and assistants was fascinating and this book encouraged me to research the creation of dictionaries further. As the author's note mentions at the end of the story, many of the people and events in this book were real. But Esme, her father, her friend Gareth, and servant Lizzie were fictional. I admired the characters of Lizzie, Gareth, and Esme's father for what seemed to be hard work during lifetimes of trying circumstances.

Esme too had her trials, often due to choices she made, but I felt like the story was brought down by her constant sadness and long bouts of depression. The character of Lizzie, losing her mother to death at the age of eleven and her siblings to orphanages and becoming a lifelong servant at that young age, is a much more compelling story, for me. This is a girl/woman whose life consists of arising long before her masters, to get things ready for the household, working more than sixteen hours a day, not being able to go to bed until after everyone else in the household. This is her life, day in, day out, as long as she is able to get out of bed and do it again. Constant sleep deprivation and no life of her own, no chance of a husband or family and yet, Lizzie's attitude to life is an inspiration. 

Lizzie's story ties in well with the part of the story about suffragists attempting to change things for women. But Lizzie wants no part of that, she is practical and knows that she can only be thankful not to be living on the streets. Esme, even though she is working class, has her loving dad, a home, eventually a job working in the Scriptorium, yet she never seems happy. If only the fictional character of Esme could have learned how to better cope with her blessings, I might have enjoyed her part in the story more. I appreciated getting to learn about this time in our history and the real people who worked to give us the Oxford English Dictionary. I give this story 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars. This was a great buddy read with DeAnn and Mary Beth.

Publication: April 6, 2021

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine and NetGalley for this ARC.

Nilufer Ozmekik

Rating: really liked it

This is brilliantly well- researched, detailed, refreshing journey emphasizing the importance of words, empowerment and raising the voices of women during the World War I with layered, impeccably crafted, memorable true characters who changed the world with their special and remarkable contributions.

I have to admit: this book needs your patience, attention, full focus. Especially first third is overwhelmingly slow but when you get into the story and lose yourself in the precious world of words, connecting with Esme and the preparation process of first Oxford dictionary, your curiosity takes over and you get more excited to learn more by becoming part of the world and linguistics.

Esme is a little girl, creating herself a secluded universe at a garden shed of Oxford called “ Scriptorium”. Her invisible, unheard, unnoticed place was beneath the sorting table where his father and a loyal team of lexicographers work on collecting words for the first Oxford Dictionary.

One day, Esme finds a slip of paper fluttered on the floor. The word “bondmaid” is written on it. She hides the paper, stashing at Lizzie’s trunk. ( Lizzie is the maid working for them, raising her after her mother passed away)

Later she finds other tossed slip of papers so stashing them is turning into her special game. Later she realizes each word she stashed relating with women unrecorded. That gives her idea to form her own dictionary consists of lost words mostly about women’s world!

With the suffrage movement’s rising and Great War’s looming, a new history starts written itself with the unrecorded, abandoned, neglected words!

It’s compelling, well- developed, great work enlighten us about the unknown pages of history and magical power of true words.

I highly recommend it to historical fiction and based on real characters fiction fans. It’s quite informative, intense, realistic novel to read and absorb slowly.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group/ Ballantine for sending me this digital copy of incredible arc in exchange my honest review.

Keiran Rogers

Rating: it was amazing

This is one of the best books I have ever published.
A cracking plot about how the word Bondmaid was stolen from the Oxford English Dictionary, but also a book of gorgeous characters. This had me crying like a baby at the end.

Liz

Rating: it was amazing

Lovely. Wonderful. Sublime. Delightful. Enchanting. Charming.

This is one of those books whose premise just enthralled me. Esme’s father was one of the lexicographers working on the Oxford English Dictionary. She grew up understanding the power of words. As she gets older, she also starts working on the dictionary. First running errands, but eventually being given more responsibilities.
Fair warning, the first part of the book is a bit slow. It’s not until Esme takes it into her head to collect words for another dictionary, the Dictionary of Lost Words, that it truly comes alive. If history is written by the victors, then in the same vein, vocabulary is deemed meaningful only if it’s the words of the educated, male, ruling class. Her first word is knackered. “Lizzie had never once said she felt listless, but she was knackered all the time.” Esme definitely gets an education with some of the words. Let’s just say they’re not words used by polite society.
The book is perfect for those that love language. But it’s also a great story, filled with lovely characters. Not just Esme, but her Da, Harry, and Ditte, a dear family friend. Ditte’s letters to Harry are interspersed throughout the book and really helped round it out, giving us a different look at Esme. The book took turns I never saw coming. It encompasses two big chapters of history - the suffragette movement and WWI. It spans from 1887 - 1989. And it shows us love, in all its permutations.
LOVE A passionate affection
ETERNAL Everlasting, endless, beyond death.

My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

Marianne

Rating: it was amazing

“Some words stretched so far back in time that our modern understanding of them was nothing more than an echo of the original, a distortion. I used to think it was the other way around, that the misshapen words of the past were clumsy drafts of what they would become; that the words formed on our tongues, in our time were true and complete. But everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption.”

The Dictionary of Lost Words is the first novel by English-born Australian author, Pip Williams. Ever since she was a little girl, sitting under the sorting table at her Da’s feet, in the loftily-titled Scriptorium (the old iron shed lined with pigeonholes in the back garden of Sunnyside), Esme has loved words.

Under the direction of the editor, Dr James Murray, and with several other assistant lexicographers, her Da, Henry Nicoll was compiling a dictionary: the Oxford English Dictionary. The words, their meanings and their use in quotes came on slips of paper, to be sorted and debated (sometimes quite vociferously) and included or rejected.

“Whenever we came across a word I didn’t know, he would read the quotation it came with and help me work out what it meant. If I asked the right questions, he would try to find the book the quotation came from and read me more. It was like a treasure hunt, and sometimes I struck gold.”

The slips might be discarded, the word rejected if the definition was incomplete, or a duplicate. Esme hated the idea that words would be lost. And sometimes slips were dropped. Esme began to save these words. They would go into her Dictionary of Lost Words.

This unusual, inquisitive little girl wasn’t going to fit the middle-class wife-and-mother mould. At school: “If all the children at St Barnabas were a single word, most would be examples of the main definition. But I’d be some rarely used sense, one that’s spelled strangely. One that’s no use to anyone.” Esme was happiest when working in the Scriptorium.

Eventually, “I had a desk and would be given tasks… I would serve the words as they served the words.” She later came to realise that words would not be included for various reasons, but the one that most troubled her was that the word did not appear in print, even if it was commonly used.

“I’m sure that there are plenty of wonderful words flying around that have never been written on a slip of paper. I want to record them. … Because I think they are just as important as the words Dr Murray and Da collect. … I think sometimes the proper words mustn’t be quite right, and so people make new words up, or use old words differently.”

But it was when she was exposed to a charismatic suffragette that she began to notice how the process was skewed against women, the poor and the disenfranchised. And if motherless Esme wasn’t brave enough to take their type of militant action, her female mentor could suggest a less blatant way.

Williams populates her novel with a marvellous cast of characters: quirky, diligent, loyal, nasty, loving and wise, they’re all there, and emotional investment in Esme and her friends is difficult to resist. She deftly demonstrates the power of words: sometimes, just one will bring a lump to the throat, a tear to the eye.

Her extensive research is clear from every page: so much interesting information, both historical and philological, is woven into this wonderful tale. Especially fascinating to any lover of words is the process of making a new dictionary, illustrating the reason it takes so long. Laugh, cry and incidentally, learn a lot in this brilliant debut.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Affirm Press.

Annette

Rating: it was amazing

The first Oxford English Dictionary was created in 1901 only by men. Archives have proved that there were “female volunteers, assistants, spouses, none of whose contributions were acknowledged.” Where there any words “these scholarly men might have chosen to omit from their version of the English language?” This question becomes the premise for this story.

Oxford, 1887. Esme’s father is “one of Dr. Murray’s most trusted lexicographers,” and she doesn’t have a mother to care for her, thus a blind eye is being turned, when she is in the Scriptorium - under a table. As a word on a piece of paper slips off the end of the table, she catches it and saves it. When she questions what happens to the words that are left out, she is told, “If there isn’t enough information about them, they’re discarded.”

With time she becomes an assistant, now working ‘above’ the table. Esme’s ambition grows. She wants to collect the words on her own, and not just wait for them to come by mail to the Scriptorium. She fills her pockets with slips and pencils and ventures to the Covered Market on Saturdays. Mabel, who sells used wares, fills Esme with plenty of words, even with some which may raise one’s eyebrow or give a good chuckle.

The rule of dictionary is if a word is commonly spoken, but not commonly written, then it will not be included. Esme argues this rule.

Enjoyable atmosphere. I enjoyed very much the description of the Scriptorium. A shed at the back of the house filled with scholars, who have their routine, which gives a unique atmosphere. Also, the circle of friends. When Esme goes to Bath for some time to assist their friend in her research, who is an expert in history and respected for her knowledge. She creates a circle of scholars who come to her house and others on regular bases. The atmosphere of the afternoon tea gatherings is very special.

The story begins with Esme as a young curious and bubbly girl, then she becomes closed off due to some events. Being surrounded by loving people helps her heal and she becomes approachable again and thriving. You can feel this process of her transformation.

What makes this story very special, it is its uniqueness. Like no other story ever told before. The search for words and defining them. And lovable characters you warm up to very quickly. With a deep grasp of words a unique story is woven evoking time, place and character, saturated with beautiful prose.

Source: ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Neale

Rating: it was amazing

So many times the blurbs on the front and back cover of novels are nothing but hyperbole, the novel failing to live up to exaggerated expectations, but Tom Keneally’s blurb,

“There will not be this year a more original novel published. I just know it.”

This is not hyperbole.

Esme’s mother died, so her father must look after her through the day. Esme is hiding under the placing table, her normal place of residence while her father and fellow lexicographers write the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, adding words, definitions. It is a tiring laborious process. It is from this “hiding place” under the table that Esme “steals” her first word. The slip of paper containing the word “Bondmaid” flutters down and lands in front of Esme who snatches it, not knowing the consequences that her actions will have in the future.

As time progresses and Esme grows older, she starts to build her own dictionary. A dictionary made up of words that will not be included in the official dictionary. She sources these words from many delightful characters and most of the words have a tendency to be female slang words, or words currently in the dictionary that take on a very different meaning for these ladies.

Firstly, there is her own “bondmaid”, Lizzie, who is more of a dear friend then a servant, remaining faithfully by Esme’s side throughout the whole novel. Then there is Mabel O’Shaughnessy, a truly brilliant character who lives in poverty and sells bits and bobs, trinkets, anything she thinks she can really, at the market. Mabel enlightens Esme to the crude, the crass, the slang words that would never be entered into the official dictionary. Tilda is an actress who Esme also finds at the markets. She is a suffragette, not afraid to get her hands bloody, or break a few laws in the interminable fight for the vote.

It is Tilda who opens Esme’s eyes to the plight of women and how they are treated as second class citizens without a voice. Williams’ uses Tilda to explore the theme of the suffragettes and the bravery of the women who strove to be heard and succeeded.

The book spans from 1887 to the epilogue in 1989. Therefore, Williams also covers the period of The Great War and the effect it had on every facet of life. All the able-bodied men were raring to go, some thinking it would all be over in weeks. None of them prepared for the terrible nightmare they were doomed to become trapped in. The war itself proves to be a repository. Esme visits an infirmary where wounded soldiers provide yet more words for the fledgling dictionary.

“If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words.”

There is a lovely touch towards the end of the novel in which Esme is given the charge of looking after a young soldier who is suffering from severe shellshock, or PTSD. He remembers nothing, and simple words are beyond his comprehension. Esme uses the Esperanto language, a constructed, auxiliary language built with the intention to sow peace between nations, to help him. A beautiful message. It is a tribute to the power of words when the patient's doctor tells Esme,

“This is the first time he has been calmed by words instead of chloroform.”

Pip Williams has attempted and succeeded in giving a voice, although Esme is a work of fiction, to the women who worked just as tirelessly as the men on this dictionary. She has built a narrative that revolves around the stolen word “Bondmaid”. It starts the novel off, it is integral to the narrative, and then it is there in the epilogue.

A brilliant novel. Especially for lovers of words. 5 stars!

DeAnn

Rating: really liked it

3.5 lexicographer stars

This book is highly researched and opened up a new world to me with the origins of early dictionaries. I never thought much about how a dictionary was put together and updated.

Our main character is Esme, and the book follows her life from a young child through adulthood. She is raised by her father and he is a lexicographer. She frequently joins him at work in the Scriptorium – a repurposed garden shed – filled with scholars researching words, derivations, and definitions. She graduates from “under the table” to an assistant with her own desk. She checks citations at the library and realizes that there are some words that women use that are not in the dictionary.

So begins the Dictionary of Lost Words as Esme gathers words and definitions from the local market and some of the interesting characters there. A frequent contributor is also Lizzie, the maid to the main editor of the dictionary. Lizzie and Esme have an interesting relationship. I also enjoyed the character of Ditte who serves as Esme’s mother figure. There are side stories with the start of the suffrage movement in England and the buildup to World War I. I also enjoyed Esme’s romance with Gareth.

While I did enjoy this one, it was a slow read and the characters do not enjoy much happiness. I think it was authentic to history, but I need more joy in life, especially during a pandemic!

This was a good buddy read with Mary Beth and Marilyn. We had lots of words with this one!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine who offered me a copy to read and review.

Carolyn

Rating: really liked it

In her Author's Note, Pip Williams says that the idea for writing this book came from the non-fiction accounts of the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which all ignore the contribution of women in this huge undertaking. Her research lead her to discover that there were female assistants, including the daughters of the chief editor James Murray, Hilda, Rosfrith and Elsie who all worked in the 'Scriptorium', a large tin shed in Murray's garden, in sorting, compiling and checking words and quotations and sorting them into groups in pigeonholes ready for editing. Editor Henry Bradley's daughter Eleanor worked alongside him at a second office in the Old Ashmolean museum. Many woman also sent in quotations for the words, including sisters Edith and Elizabeth Thompson who provided thousands of quotations and editorial assistance from the first to the last volume.

In writing this novel, Ms Williams has addressed this lack of recognition of women by highlighting the role they played in the production of the dictionary over the fifty years it took to compile. Her fictional character Esme, first appears as a little girl sitting quietly under her widowed father's desk collecting words that are lost or discarded. As she grows she comes to understand the importance of words and their meanings and also realises that many words in common usage which are important to women are not being included in the dictionary. This starts her on her own journey of discovery and collection of words significant only to women. Her friendship with a female suffragette and the loss of young men to war will also awaken her to the role of women in her world. As Esme becomes an assistant herself and takes on more responsibilities for the dictionary, she is supported by the real life women who played a role in putting it together, notably Murray's daughters and Edith Thompson with whom she has a close life-long relationship.

The novel is a little slow to get going, but once it does both Esme's story and that of the dictionary become absorbing reading. Esme's life is not easy as she suffers significant losses but through it all she never loses her love of words. For a non-fiction companion piece I recommend The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester (the US edition is called The Professor and the Madman), an account of the fascinating relationship between James Murray and one of his contributors who was the inmate of an asylum for the insane.

A photo from Wikipedia (author unknown) of James Murray in the Scriptorium in front of the pigeonholes used to sort and store the words and quotations

Gloria Arthur

Rating: liked it

⭐️3 Stars⭐️
The Dictionary of Lost Words has had so much attention and the cover is quite stunning. I did find the first half of the book slow and a little boring, but because it had such good reviews I kept reading and was so pleased I did. The second half of the book was most enjoyable and it was quite an eye opener into the history of the Oxford Dictionary.

The book is a fictional story revolving around the creation of the first Oxford dictionary. Esme is a young girl who likes to spend her childhood sitting beneath the sorting table in a garden shed they name the ’Scriptorium’. This is where her lexicographer father and other workers debate which words are to be included in the dictionary. Here Esme sits unseen and unheard, she is motherless and is raised by her father.

The word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor and Esme hides it and then stashes it in an old trunk that belongs to Lizzie a maid who helps to raise her, this will be the first of a collection of slips she hides. This is the story of Esme's life and her fascination with words.

The book touches on subjects of single parenthood, the suffrage movement, World War 1 and the bias towards the language of women and the lower classes.

Recommended for lovers of language. Extensive research and love has gone into the writing of this book which is based on major historical events and real-life characters.

Gumble's Yard (aka Golden Reviewer)

Rating: it was amazing

Now shortlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction

Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realised that the words most often used to define us were words that described out function in relation to others. Even the most benign words – maiden, wife, mother – told the world whether we were virgins or not ………. I looked out of the window towards the scriptorium, the place where all the definitions of the words were being bedded down. What words would define me?

The book takes place over a century from 1887 to 1989 and effectively is a fictionalisation and re-interpretation of a true story – the compilation of the Oxford University Press’s New English Dictionary (which became better now as the Oxford English Dictionary) under the editorship of Sir James Murray and a team of lexicographers, based for much of their time in the Scriptorium – a shed in Murray’s garden where the thousands of standard-sized slips, received from around the world setting out meanings and usages of words are examined, evaluated, compiled and storied in a series of specially designed pigeon-holes.

Our first party, fictional, narrator is Emse Nicoll whose widowed father Harry works as a lexicographer in the Scriptorium. We first encounter her as a young child – burning her hands trying to receive a rejected slip which happens to feature her Mother’s name (Lily) from a fire. And this sets something of the pattern for Esme’s young life (and the direction of her later life): as someone who is both seeking a mother figure and who seeks to rescue words, meanings and usages rejected or excluded from, or simply not even considered worth for, the dictionary

The crucial opening scene of the book is cleverly based around a true incident (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/5...) – the only known undeliberate omission from the collected works – the word Bondmaid (meaning slave girl).

Esme who spends her days under the sorting table – spots and decides to keep a stray slip with that word on it and stores it, largely forgotten, in a small suitcase owned by a housemaid Lizzie.

Although this loss is not spotted Esme’s subsequent light-fingered attraction to the slips is noticed and discouraged. That however does not prevent her from embarking on a project to collect lost words and to start to compile the eponymous collection.

The opening third of the novel is I have to say rather simplistically written, as well as slowly paced and maybe rather repetitive (slips put on tables seem to live up to their verbal usage a little too often. In both aspects though I realised that this fits Esme’s life at that stage: she is, of course, an immature young first party narrator; and her word-collection projection is rather ill founded and directionless at this time - perhaps as much as anything a reaction to the loss of her mother.

The need for a substitute mother (or at least supportive female figure) takes three different paths as Esme grows up and the novel simultaneously hits its stride.

The first is Lizzie: hearing of Esme’s quest for words, she takes her to a street market where she introduces her to Mabel – who opens Esme’s ears to a range of words excluded from the dictionary due to both the sex and class of the people that use them. Their first encounter – and some of the words that Mabel uses and defines gives a very abrupt change from the novel’s rather genteel opening. Esme also refinds her long hidden Bondmaid slip – and when Lizzie realises that the word fits her own servitude it also starts to open Esme’s eyes further to class inequality.

The second is an encounter with a group of actors – including a suffragette Tilda (and her brother who gives Emse her first relationship). This opens Emse’s eyes to the fight for women’s rights and also brings in the different tactics used in the fight for voting rights (as well as what universal suffrage means – Esme only two conscious that even the most militant suffragettes are happy with votes for female property owners.

The third is via the (real life) Edith Thompson – a key volunteer on the Dictionary project. In the novel as Ditte she acts as an close Aunt to Esme and advisor to Esme’s father on how to raise a daughter – her letters to both are scattered throughout the letter. Not all her interventions are positive – a recommendation for a boarding school backfires badly – but later she plays a crucial role when Emse’s life is at a crisis, in an extended spell away from Oxford which gives the book a real emotional strength.

Later Esme forms a deepening relationship with one of the typesetters at the Oxford University Press before their relationship, and the final stages of the OED suffer the disruption of World War I – where despite the horrors and the personal tragedy she still finds a way for language and words (in this case Esperanto) to reach the marginalised (in this case a shell shock victim

After its rather shaky start, this is just a really very well executed book – every aspect has taken thought and consideration. Whether it’s: the nicely illustrated Oxford street maps at the start; the word and time span headings for each Part of the book; the lengthy, informative and considered Author’s Note; the cleverly designed acknowledgements; the twin timelines (of OED and historical events); the copious research; the one photograph (and the way it is included in the text as well as in the Acknowledgements) and so on. This is a book which has benefited from time, love and attention from its author, editors and publishers.

But best of all is the bravura ending to the book which simultaneously: brings the story to the modern day; brilliantly links the second edition of the OED to a second edition of Esme (one more able to take advantage of the educational and professional opportunties available to female lexiographers in the late 20th century); movingly reminds us that in the same way that collections of English words has lead to forgotten voices of women and the poor – the English language itself is a sign of colonialisation and involved the loss of native, first people languages in Australia (something which is also sensitivly picked up in the Acknowledgements and which links the book to another Australian literary wonder “The Yield”).

Highly recommended.

I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself? I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them. My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard.

My thanks to Random House UK, Chatto and Windus for an ARC via NetGalley

Ingrid

Rating: liked it

The history of the Oxford English dictionary is central in this book. A novel has been written around it, in which women's suffrage and the First World War are discussed. Unfortunately I wasn't moved by it in any way.

Nikki

Rating: it was ok

I really wanted to like this but my pet peeve with historical novels is when the writer can't stop themselves putting modern sensibilities into the actions, words and motives of the characters. It tosses you right out of the world the writer is trying to recreate. In this novel, it felt as if the writer had more than one ideological barrow to push and in the end, I kept losing the sense of the story and felt like I was reading a woke sermon.
My other criticism is the inconsistencies in the main character. There were times when she would make a decision or speech and it made no sense to how the character had acted or how she had processed her life experiences up till that point. It was as if the writer had decided particular things had to be done or said regardless of whether they fit the character. Not a smooth read.

Note for those who like to be aware: there is quite foul language.

Marianne

Rating: it was amazing

The Bolinda audio version is read by Imogen Sage, and is an absolute joy to listen to.
“Some words stretched so far back in time that our modern understanding of them was nothing more than an echo of the original, a distortion. I used to think it was the other way around, that the misshapen words of the past were clumsy drafts of what they would become; that the words formed on our tongues, in our time were true and complete. But everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption.”

The Dictionary of Lost Words is the first novel by English-born Australian author, Pip Williams. Ever since she was a little girl, sitting under the sorting table at her Da’s feet, in the loftily-titled Scriptorium (the old iron shed lined with pigeonholes in the back garden of Sunnyside), Esme has loved words.

Under the direction of the editor, Dr James Murray, and with several other assistant lexicographers, her Da, Henry Nicoll was compiling a dictionary: the Oxford English Dictionary. The words, their meanings and their use in quotes came on slips of paper, to be sorted and debated (sometimes quite vociferously) and included or rejected.

“Whenever we came across a word I didn’t know, he would read the quotation it came with and help me work out what it meant. If I asked the right questions, he would try to find the book the quotation came from and read me more. It was like a treasure hunt, and sometimes I struck gold.”

The slips might be discarded, the word rejected if the definition was incomplete, or a duplicate. Esme hated the idea that words would be lost. And sometimes slips were dropped. Esme began to save these words. They would go into her Dictionary of Lost Words.

This unusual, inquisitive little girl wasn’t going to fit the middle-class wife-and-mother mould. At school: “If all the children at St Barnabas were a single word, most would be examples of the main definition. But I’d be some rarely used sense, one that’s spelled strangely. One that’s no use to anyone.” Esme was happiest when working in the Scriptorium.

Eventually, “I had a desk and would be given tasks… I would serve the words as they served the words.” She later came to realise that words would not be included for various reasons, but the one that most troubled her was that the word did not appear in print, even if it was commonly used.

“I’m sure that there are plenty of wonderful words flying around that have never been written on a slip of paper. I want to record them. … Because I think they are just as important as the words Dr Murray and Da collect. … I think sometimes the proper words mustn’t be quite right, and so people make new words up, or use old words differently.”

But it was when she was exposed to a charismatic suffragette that she began to notice how the process was skewed against women, the poor and the disenfranchised. And if motherless Esme wasn’t brave enough to take their type of militant action, her female mentor could suggest a less blatant way.

Williams populates her novel with a marvellous cast of characters: quirky, diligent, loyal, nasty, loving and wise, they’re all there, and emotional investment in Esme and her friends is difficult to resist. She deftly demonstrates the power of words: sometimes, just one will bring a lump to the throat, a tear to the eye.

Her extensive research is clear from every page: so much interesting information, both historical and philological, is woven into this wonderful tale. Especially fascinating to any lover of words is the process of making a new dictionary, illustrating the reason it takes so long. Laugh, cry and incidentally, learn a lot in this brilliant debut.

Sally Hepworth

Rating: it was amazing

ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT