The Dictionary of Lost Words

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6 and Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Themes

The Relationship between Language and Community

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 the Scriptorium, and even more that don’t make it into the Dictionary. The Scriptorium, for all its scholarly magic, is too small—literally and figuratively. Sometimes, Esme—or other characters—searches for the perfect word to communicate her feelings, but language fails to account for what human experiencing.

Esme’s friendships with Lizzie, Mabel, Tilda, and others from outside her socio-economic tier open up new words, often ones strongly associated with women or the working class. Esme questions the Scriptorium’s insistence that words like this are inappropriate, since most of what Dr. Murray considers taboo has to do with the female body, while terms for repulsive gendered concepts like “Bondmaid” are fair game for the OED. As the novel moves through the social and political upheaval of early 20th century England, it considers the way language is affected by cataclysmic change. Seemingly medieval terms like “Scold’s Bridle” (263) take on new meaning as the suffragettes face force-feeding torture, while a soldier suffering from PTSD must forsake English altogether for Esperanto.

Although Esme is in danger of becoming a different kind of gatekeeper for her Women’s Words, her new awareness of the relationship between words and social class allows her to hear out Lizzie subjective experience: While Lizzie, a former servant, wants to reclaim the word “Bondmaid”—a term for a female enslaved person that fills Esme with revulsion—Lizzie reacts badly to obscenities that Esme is able to look at with a detached, objective eye. Despite any dictionary’s efforts to unify the use of words, each person’s relationship with language is different, informed by upbringing and values—no two people speak the same language in exactly the same way.

Gender Dynamics

In her Author’s Note, Pip Williams writes, “This book began as two simple questions: Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?” (405). Women were rarely mentioned in historical accounts of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, despite many being active volunteers for the compiling effort—a discrepancy that drove Williams’s interest in the roles men and women were accorded in England at the beginning of the 20th century. Esme experiences systematic sexism throughout the novel. She meets resistance from male lexicographers as a researcher in the Scriptorium, where even the seemingly benign Dr. Murray assigns her menial or lesser tasks because of her gender.

The novel juxtaposes the project of the OED with the women’s suffrage movement; as men decide which words are appropriate to include (ones that have been published) and exclude (colloquialisms having to do with women’s bodies), women like Tilda fight to make themselves seen and heard. Lizzie and even Esme disagree with the movement’s resorting to violence, but the novel makes it clear that the women’s terrorism comes from desperation. The activists think of themselves as fighting a war against the social status quo, even as actual war overtakes Europe. The novel valorizes men who support the women involved in the suffrage movement—the fact that Gareth and Bill take up some aspects of its ideals is meant to characterize them as upstanding.

As Esme develops an awareness of the misogyny that underlies the culture around her, she considers the gendered stereotyping inherent in language: “Even the most benign words—maiden, wife, mother—told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it (266). These musings allow Williams to contrast the very public and heralded publication of the OED with Esme’s quieter battle to assemble a collection of lost words—primarily private language that she picks up from working-class or lower-class women. With Gareth’s help, this eventually become Women’s Words and Their Meanings, which Esme determinedly includes in Oxford University’s famed Bodleian Library. Her desire to be taken seriously as an academic comes to fruition in the future through her daughter Megan, whose successful career as a scholar is sketched in the novel’s Epilogue.

Class Divides

The novel explores boundaries between classes, which were markedly bounded in early 20th century England. When Esme befriends Lizzie as a child, she has little grasp of the fact that Lizzie’s life is one of hard labor until Harry explains, “Lizzie is fortunate to be in service, but for you it would be unfortunate” (17). The idea that the best Lizzie could hope for is a life of serving others undergirds the women’s relationship: Esme learns to read easily, while Lizzie remains illiterate; Esme is allowed long periods of recovery from a variety of ailments, while Lizzie must nurse her to health almost as a surrogate mother. For most of her life, Esme takes the one-sidedness of the relationship for granted—only when they leave Oxford is Lizzie allowed to blossom into a person with her own friends, interests, and agency; even then, she relies on Ditte or Esme to remain in communication with her new friend Mrs. Lloyd.

Class divisions also fracture the suffrage movement, which does its best to obscure its upper-class roots by keeping the focus on gender issues. Lizzie doesn’t hesitate to point out that the actions of the suffragettes are not intended to benefit women of her class. Soon, Esme moves on from her initial, simplistic conception of Emmeline Pankhurst’s movement: While meeting Tilda and her friends at the pub, Esme perceives that the three women are from different social ranks and pointedly reminds them that “we are not all struggling in the same way. Isn’t it true that Mrs. Pankhurst was willing to negotiate for women with property and education to get the vote, but not women like Gareth’s mother, for instance?” (290). As Esme draws attention to this essential though commonly overlooked detail, Williams gets the chance to de-romanticize some of her readers’ notions of the suffrage movement; simultaneously, this is a chance for Esme to demonstrate character growth—she can now empathize with perspectives other than her own. Esme’s Women’s Words tries to correct this omission, bringing together the language of women of different classes.