The Dictionary of Misplaced Phrases: A Novel

Esme is born right into a world of phrases. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood within the Scriptorium, a backyard shed in Oxford the place her father and a crew of devoted lexicographers are accumulating phrases for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Younger Esme’s place is beneath the sorting desk, unseen and unheard. Sooner or later a slip of paper containing the phrase bondmaid flutters beneath the desk. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the phrase means “slave woman,” she begins to gather different phrases which have been discarded or uncared for by the dictionary males.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that phrases and meanings referring to girls’s and customary people’ experiences usually go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to go looking out phrases for her personal dictionary: the Dictionary of Misplaced Phrases. To take action she should go away the sheltered world of the college and enterprise out to fulfill the individuals whose phrases will fill these pages.

Set in the course of the top of the ladies’s suffrage motion and with the Nice Conflict looming, The Dictionary of Misplaced Phrases reveals a misplaced narrative, hidden between the traces of a historical past written by males. Impressed by precise occasions, creator Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to inform this extremely unique story. The Dictionary of Misplaced Phrases is a pleasant, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of phrases and the ability of language to form the world.