The Dictionary Of Lost Words

Author: Pip Williams
Started: May 23, 2025
Finished: May 27, 2025
Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 384 pages
Part Of A Series: Yes
Type Of Book: Physical
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49354511-the-dictionary-of-lost-words
Storygraph Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/eed16e0e-539f-4b53-9dbb-9eec1e2c0a6a

Review:

Since the first time I read this book I have been occasionally dreaming about it. I don't normally do that with books. In the Goober Readathon 2025 one of the prompts was for a book you own. I decided to use this book for that prompt - and I'd finally get to reread it.

It's still one of the few books out of my normal genres of reading that I love. While this is historical fiction, for a nerd like me this is a bit magical. Learning is always something I love to do. Being in the building where the dictionary was partially made would have seemed like a wonderland to me.

The review from 2023 still stands true for this book to me. I still loose words and it made me feel.

Goodreads Description:

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and 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 another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

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