How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary

by Grace Tierney

“How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary” is a light-hearted look at the lives of the soldiers, inventors, style icons, and villains who gave their names to the English language as eponyms. From atlas to zeppelin English is full of words named for Greek gods, explorers, serious scientists, and crafty chefs. These heroes and heroines, scattered through world history, all did something extraordinary to squeeze their name into the dictionary, and this book celebrates their biographies.

More than 260 eponyms are featured across subjects as diverse as food, Irish history, calendars, hats, inventions, words named after places, Greek gods, military history, politics, astronomy, fashion, popular phrases, villains, science, and a selection of eponyms which simply defy categorisation. Ideal for word geeks, history lovers, and biography buffs.

366 pages, Paperback

Published August 20, 2018

About the author

Grace Tierney writes in rural Ireland. Her award winning Wordfoolery blog about unusual English words has been running for 16 years exploring everything from “pooka” to “friggatriskaidekaphobia”.

Grace has serialised three novels on the online reading platform Channillo and published four word history books (print & ebook) - "Words Christmas Gave Us", "Words the Vikings Gave Us", "Words the Sea Gave Us" and “How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary”. She’s an etymology blogger, columnist in her local paper, regular radio contributor, and publishes articles and short fiction. When not writing you’ll find her reading, crafting, or hiking up a hill.

Grace’s favourite eponymous hero is Casanova because his swashbuckling life was so extraordinary, yet he ended up as a quiet librarian. Her favourite word from the sea is gollywobbler because it's silly. Her favourite Viking words are hug (so unexpected!) and attercop because it's from her beloved childhood book "The Hobbit". Her favourite Christmas word is twixtmas because she loves that quiet time between Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Reviews

[Maria Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began to read this book before Christmas. On reflection, perhaps this is a bad time to read a factual book as I read fiction avidly. However, I enjoyed the many categories particularly the section: Be Irish, which delved into all things of Irish nature, i.e. Murphy's Law, Garry Owen. The chapter called, Are you a style icon? left me smiling mostly because I realise as I read it that I would never ever be called such. With many other interesting and varied chapter headings, I worked my way through the book and discovered that this book would make a great addition to any household shelf-sitting alongside the dictionary and thesaurus or definitely in my house as the book is filled with so many facts.

[Noelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, quirky, Grace Tierney writes clear and precise prose as she takes us on a tour of words that derived from a person's name. This is a book loaded with fascinating facts. With plenty of humour, you will pick it up again and again.