The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams

Some words are more important than others—I learned this, growing up in the Scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.

“But when we talk about her, she comes to life.” “Never

Words are our tools of resurrection.”

“Words are like stories, don’t you think, Mr. Sweatman? They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.

A vulgar word, well placed and said with just enough vigour, can express far more than its polite equivalent.

Dictionary is a history book, Esme. If it has taught me anything, it is that the way we conceive of things now will most certainly change.

So often, the words chosen by the men of the Dictionary had been inadequate.

We will get the vote sooner or later, but that will not be the end of it. The fight will go on, and it cannot rely solely on women prepared to starve themselves.

keep considering the words we use and record. Once the question of women’s political suffrage has been dealt with, less obvious inequalities will need to be exposed.

“Who uses them?” I was ready now to have the fight I’d shied from just minutes earlier. “The poor. People who work at the Covered Market. Women. Which is why they’re not written down and why they’ve been excluded. Though sometimes they have been written down, but they’re still left out because they are not used in polite society.”

It was a quiet celebration. We spoke of words, not war,

Their words are ordinary, but they are assembled into sentences that are grotesque.

‘I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.’

“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us. But what happens when words that are spoken are not recorded? What effect does that have on the speaker of those words?

This novel is my attempt to understand how the way we define language might define us.

I had become acutely aware that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a flawed and gendered text.