Cover image for The dictionary of lost words
The dictionary of lost words
Title:
The dictionary of lost words
Author:
Williams, Pip, author.
ISBN:
9780655665229
Additional ISBN:
9780655665229 0655665226

AU@
Personal Author:
Edition:
Unabridged.
Publication Information:
Tullamarine, Victoria : Bolinda Audio, [2020]

℗2020.
Physical Description:
11 audio discs (CD) (12 hours, 43 minutes) : digital, stereo ; 12 cm ; in container.
Participant or Performer:
Read by Imogen Sage.
Language:
English
Abstract:
In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others - that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.