PIP WILLIAMS The Dictionary of Lost Words ****

In 1901, the word 'bondmaid' was found to be missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. That's a fact.

This is the fictional story of the girl who stole it. A story that Rachel and I both loved.

Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, the garden shed in Oxford where her father works alongside James Murray, the first editor of the OED, and a team of lexicographers. Their task is to gather words and examples of their use for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme likes to sit and crawl beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word 'bondmaid' flutter to the floor unclaimed.

As the years pass Esme realises that some words were considered more important than others, and that they had to have been written down and published to make it into the dictionary. This meant a lot of working class words were unrecorded - in particular words relating to women's experiences. So Esme sets out to collect words for another dictionary: Women's Words and Their Meanings. To do this she regularly goes to the market in Oxford, writes down the words she hears and gets the women to define them and put them in a sentence.

Pip Williams writes that her novel “began as two simple questions. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?” From the local suffragettes Esme learns that “sisters” can mean comrades. She puzzles over the definition of “mother” and whether it excludes a woman who has a stillbirth, or who gives her daughter up for adoption, or whose son dies in the first world war.

It's a fascinating and moving story, especially if like me you enjoy words.