The Dictionary of Lost Words

Esme’s Dictionary of Lost Words, which eventually becomes the published reference work Women’s Words, begins as a way to give meaning to the lost, stolen, or discarded word slips that a young Esme secretes away in a treasure box. Esme’s instinct to hoard these objects comes from her desire to rescue the word “Lily” when her father threw it into the fire—her drive to hold onto a sample of her mother’s name was important enough to subject herself to severe burns, symbolizing the lengths to which Esme will go to preserve other elements of women’s language and communication.

Esme must get beyond the impulse to simply store her finds. One of the Scriptorium’s most odious employees, Mr. Dankworth, has a point when he tells her that hiding words in a messy trunk isn’t accomplishing anything at all. Esme is forced to acknowledge that if kept this way, “[the women’s] words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them” (247). This moment of insight underlines the novel’s insistence on why the work of the lexicographers is so important.

When, as a gesture of love, Gareth secretly arranges the type trays to publish Women’s Words and Their Meanings, he transform’s Esme research into an authoritative and scholarly volume, a useful record of language left out of the OED—a way to capture colloquialisms, slang, and other expressions used by lower-class women. After Gareth’s death, Esme fights to have her work accepted alongside that of learned men, making sure a copy of her Women’s Words ends up in the august Bodleian Library in Oxford. Just as Esme has become a professional academic, so too her Dictionary of Lost Words has gone from a pile of slips in a trunk to a scholarly volume that her daughter can hold up as an example of the lexicography of marginalized communities.