Pip Williams on missing words and forgotten women in 'The Dictionary of Lost Words'

Good Reading Podcast

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 seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk 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. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.In this episode, Pip Williams joins Greg Dobbs to share the true stories (and real women) behind the first Oxford dictionary, and how it informed her latest book. Grab a copy: https://bit.ly/2vWWQHg