by Pip Williams
This is the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, told from the point of view of the daughter of one of the men who worked on the project. The daughter initially started as a young child, hanging out in the workshop where her father and others were working. She spent a lot of time underneath the table where the men were working.
This project took several decades to complete.
The task was to identify words and then find usage of them in literature, or in newspapers that document the usage. After that the team members attempted a definition of the term. Some termswere open to a lot of discussion.
The young girl is sometimes left in the care of a young maid who works in the house on the property. They become very close friends. While the maid is only a few years older than the girl she becomes something like a mother figure for her as the young girl's mother is dead.
As time goes by the girl starts to realize that "women's words" do not necessarily make it into the dictionary or if they do they are often disparaged. The maid takes her to the local market and the young woman starts writing down words she hears there and the sentence in which they are used, then cites the name of the person who spoke the words. She keeps her precious words in a box under the maid's bed.
Eventually the young girl is given a job helping the men working on the dictionary, sorting words, running the papers with the completed words to the printers. She meets a young typesetter there and they eventually become close friends and eventually marry. Her boyfriend/fiance publishes her words into a book, The Dictionary of Lost Words. She is overjoyed at this wonderful surprise.
The book is well written and gives excellent details as to all the work that went into the compilation of the dictionary. I had picked it up on a whim and really enjoyed it.
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