The Dictionary of Lost Words

The usual clichés came to mind for this reader, easy to read, page turner etc etc. Add to that, there was a certain poignancy to the telling of the story. That story is a first-person narrative that follows the life of a non-existent character, Esme, in the world of those that did exist, the compilers of the English Oxford Dictionary during the times of The Great War and the Suffragette movement. It made for a light read, but one that was also thought provoking.

The use of words is the great divider.
Esme wrote “There was no ends to the words. No end to what they meant, or the ways they had been used. Some words' histories stretched so far back that our modern understanding of them was nothing more than an echo of the original, a distortion. I used to think it was the other way round, that the misshapen words of the past were a clumsy draft of what they would become; that the words formed on our tongues, in our time, were true and complete. But I was realising that, in fact, everything that comes after the first utterance is corruption.”


Recommended to all that love words.