Facilitator : Michelle Brubaker

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . .
[a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work
on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times
Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or
repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the
Book
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.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War
looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines
of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved
into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The
Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking
celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.