Winner of the Australian Book Industry Award
A Reese's Book Club Pick
A New York Times Bestselling Author
Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. Learning that the word means "slave girl," Esme begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. She realizes that words relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. So she begins to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.