The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams

So, yes, I think I did know they would get married.” “And then I was born and then she died.” “Yes.” “But when we talk about her, she comes to life.” “Never forget that, Esme. Words are our tools of resurrection.”

“We have embarked on the verb go,” Eleanor said. “And I suspect it will consume me for months.” She drained her teacup. “Come with me.” I’d never seen her desk up close. It was covered in papers and books and narrow boxes filled with hundreds of slips. “Behold, go,” she said with a grand gesture of her hand.

I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn’t quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.

Some words’ histories stretched so far back 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 round, 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 I was realising that, in fact, everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption. I had forgotten, already, the exact

You once made the observation that some words were considered more important than others simply because they were written down. You were arguing that by default the words of educated men were more important than the words of the uneducated classes, women among them. Do what you are good at, my dear Esme: 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.

“Nineteen eighty-nine is a significant year for the English language, though it is probably true to say that few outside this hall would know it.” There is a smattering of laughter, and he looks up, clearly pleased. “This year, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has been published, sixty-one years after the completion of the first. It combines the first edition and all the supplements, as well as an additional five thousand words and meanings.

“The great James Murray once said, ‘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.’