Goodreads Choice Awards Book Club discussion

Voted by members for Historical Fiction additional read



The Dictionary of Lost Words

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, 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. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

Anyone reading this? I just started it. I heard this is quite an emotional book.

I was wondering this as well. I'll probably start it this week :) you?

Keep us posted on your thoughts, it was a don't-really-know book for me so discounted it

I am about a quarter in. So far it’s interesting enough for me to keep reading but I’m not wowed nor emotionally provoked yet. Let’s see how it continues to go.

Glad to hear you will also be picking it up soon, Melissa!

It's pretty slow. I eventually DNFed it. I wanted it to be better than it is.

Oh dear, maybe I was right in discounting it.

I wasn’t that impressed, I found it just ok. I felt Esme lacked more spunk. I gave this book ⭐️⭐️

This one just didn’t sound that intriguing to me, but waited to see some other’s comments. Think perhaps another time, might consider it, but not a first up book.

It’s been going slow for me. Only a little over halfway done.

I finished it. The last 50 pages picked up but I wish the rest of the book wasn’t so slow. I do have a newfound appreciation for the Oxford dictionary and how much work was put into it.

I started this a couple days ago and ended up DNFing after finishing part one, just a little too slow for me.

That's too bad, Kaitlin. Looks like this one was not a hit with our group.