Review | The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

#QOTD – When was the last time you used a traditional dictionary?

I don’t even remember not Googling a word meaning! Before I came across this book, it never occurred to me all that went into compiling the Oxford or any other dictionary. It has always been there, and I never thought as to how it came to be. I think we just took for granted the existence of a dictionary.

Thanks to The Big Book Box (TBB Box), this book took me through the preparation process of the first Oxford dictionary and got me excited to learn more by becoming part of the world and linguistics.

It is a story of a little girl named Esme, spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day, Esme finds a slip of paper fluttered on the floor with the word “bondmaid” written on it. She keeps stashing such tossed slip of papers with discarded words, and forms her own dictionary consisting of lost words. And, these lost words are mostly about women’s world!

This book is pretty slow and it needed a lot of my patience, but its a detailed and a well-researched piece of work. All the historical fiction lovers out there will absolutely adore this book. It is a slow read with so much to absorb!

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