The Dictionary of Lost Words

Esme grows up beneath the sorting table of the Scriptorium, the garden shed in Oxford where a team of lexicographers, including her widowed father, are compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary in the late 1800s. As a child she starts picking up the discarded slips of paper — words the dictionary's editors judge too vulgar, too female, or too working-class to include — and begins her own hidden collection: the dictionary of lost words.

As Esme grows into adulthood, the novel follows her into the world beyond the Scriptorium, including the market women whose vocabulary she starts recording directly, the suffrage movement building around her, and the First World War that eventually touches everyone she loves. Williams uses the real, decades-long project of the OED as the backbone for a story about whose language and experience get preserved in the historical record and whose get erased.

The Dictionary of Lost Words was a major bestseller in Australia and internationally, praised for grounding a feminist premise in meticulously researched lexicographical history.