The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

This book felt like a huge apapacho* from beginning to end. It’s one of those books a part of me didn’t want to finish, just to hold on a little longer to the character.

Historical fiction as it is, most of it is a very real journey through the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published between 1884 and 1928 (featuring the real-life lexicographer and lead editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, Sir James Murray). 

What hadn’t occured to me was how words were (are) collected for a dictionary—and how many words were lost or purposefully excluded from the first OED. Particularly those words used by illiterate people; words used by poor people; words used by women. Words that the men of the dictionary didn’t have access to, or, when received, deemed unimportant if a written citation could not be traced.

So apparently the first OED lacked words like “cunt” (even though it is a very old and widely used word, even in the 1800s), “suffragette”, “sisterhood”, and “Bondmaid” (though the latter for a different reason, both in the novel and in real history).

To paraphrase the main character towards the end of the book, once she was fed up with the war and men deciding what to print and what to exclude: these men were supposed to be just the guardians of words and the dictionary, not the arbiters of what words are used or accepted. 

On the fiction side, you follow the narrator—the main character, Esme—throughout her life, from childhood to adulthood, as she navigates being a woman in late 19th and early-20th century-Oxford. That includes what it meant to be a girl and a woman throughout those decades including the fight for women’s right to vote in the UK and World War I. 

Esme takes on her own project, her dictionary of lost words, by collecting the rejected words and collecting words from the people at the market, the women at the protests, and anywhere else words lived. 

It’s a lovely way to talk about women’s history, the making of the first OED and what goes into that work (fascinating, in my opinion), growing up in a time and world that expected women to stay small (more than today), and a woman quietly defying those expectations in her own way and making sure future women had the words to express and identify themselves in more places. 

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*Apapacho: from Náhuatl, in part of Latin America it means to hug with the soul 🫶.