The Dictionary of Lost Words

Author: Pip Williams
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
​Having just read the rough, raw, from-the-gut ‘Shuggie Bain’, by complete contrast I found ‘The Dictionary of Lost Words’ diligently researched, educated (not that Shuggie wasn’t, just differently) tender and smooth-as-a-silk-stocking. Feels like it’s been much discussed – unsurprisingly, such an appealing title and pretty cover – so stop if you’ve heard it all before.  But in case you haven’t, it may be a good idea to read the Author’s Note and Timelines at the back which explain 

Australia-based writer-researcher Pip Williams’s thinking. And researching. Did I mention diligent? It took me a while (I think I disappointed a friend by suggesting it was perhaps a bit sweet. Sweet but compelling. Like Downton Abbey) and it felt a bit repetitive, but once I got into her rhythm (‘the measured flow of words and phrases in verse or prose as determined by the relation of long and short or stressed and unstressed syllables‘) I got carried along by the story. The stories in fact, because the book delivers not just the word-by-word, and faithful to history, creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, but there are also peeps into Emmaline Pankhurst’s Suffragettism, the awfulness and wastefulness of war, WWI to be exact, as well as a segue into Aus.
​Her techniques include the use of letters to sort of cover the bits that needed to be explained and expanded, and she has a way of not so much addressing an actual event, as leaving you at the gate then opening the next chapter inside the house. Does that make sense? Hopefully it will when you read it. A bonus was ‘walking or cycling’ the streets of Oxford – perhaps when lockdown allows, someone might do a Dictionary of Lost Words Walking Tour of the university city. But the element that appealed most, for me, was the thread of ‘women’s words’ (no spoilers) that were generally omitted from the original OED for coming from the mouths of the uneducated. One word in particular (I won’t mention which, but begins with C) heroine Esme defends like a lioness to a donkey of a patriarchal and stubborn academic, as having been used by Chaucer himself! Can’t argue with that piece of research.