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The Dictionary of Lost Words cover

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Pip Williams

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#4806 of 8,085 books · #738 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2021).

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.

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Publisher
Penguin Random House
ISBN-13
9781473580282
Topics
Language and meaningWomen's experiences and gender rolesComing of age

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