The Dictionary of Lost Words

The core theme of The Dictionary of Lost Words is the relationship between words and England’s social hierarchy. Although the stated goal of Dr. Murray and his fellow compilers is to create a primary authority on the English language, the novel reveals that biases as upper-class men make the project prescriptive rather than descriptive: By leaving out large swathes of colloquialism and oral usage, they simplify the dynamic and complex language around them. The Dictionary's fundamental weakness is its linguistic gatekeeping; its lexicographers are content to only draw entries from only their economic, racial, and cultural peers, necessarily creating a narrow view of English.

Through Esme, Williams shows how words can mean different things depending on the speaker’s gender, social classes, or physical situation. Growing up in an educated and privileged family, Esme is exposed in her early years to only polite and scholarly language. As she gets to know the new vocabulary on the word slips, her father tells her, “if I read every one, I’d understand the meaning of everything” (8). This simplistic idea is soon proved false: Esme discovers many words that do not find their way into