The Dictionary of Lost Words

In late nineteenth-century Oxford, the world of philology was engaged in one of the grandest projects of its time: compiling a dictionary that would encompass the entire English-speaking world. The lexicographer Harry Nichol's wife died young, and their daughter Esme grew up in the dictionary's scriptorium, the "Scrippy," among slips of paper, quotations, and sorting tables, with an almost instinctive closeness to words. One afternoon, a slip bearing a word fluttered down from a lexicographer's desk and went unclaimed; she quietly picked it up—it was the first "lost word" she collected. As Esme grows up, she discovers that the words the lexicographers ignore, disdain, or simply discard mostly concern the lives of the lower classes, and the vast majority concern women: their menstruation, their bodies, their labor, and their daily lives. Her father tells her that the dictionary records only "the consensus," and that a word not included means it is not used, not valued, and eventually forgotten. But Esme wants to ask: whose consensus is this consensus? She first carries away the rejected words from the Scrippy's scrap piles, then steps out of that closed, respectable world into markets, flower stalls, theaters, and the company of women workers, collecting living usages and example sentences from women stallholders, maids, and actresses, filing them one by one into her old leather trunk. Meanwhile, the women's suffrage movement surges and the First World War changes everyone's life—everything the Scrippy witnesses is also a kind of history. The novel is based on the true history of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, spanning from 1886 to the First World War and its aftermath, telling a history of language hidden behind the history written by men and gathered by women. The simplified Chinese edition was published by Jieli Publishing House in 2024.