The Dictionary Story
by Oliver Jeffers & Sam Winston (Walker, 2024)
Desirous of telling a story for once, a dictionary allows some of her words room to move—beginning with an alligator hungry for doughnuts! Chaos ensues: madcap antics for children, with oodles of good-humoured, metatextual word definitions for older readers to enjoy.
The Dictionary of Lost Words
by Pip Williams (Affirm, 2020)
An historical novel woven around and through the decades-long compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary. Though Williams writes powerfully on the silencing of women, Esme’s story—a conduit for social commentary—is perhaps too beholden to facts to truly dazzle as fiction.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words
by Simon Winchester (Viking, 1998)
By focussing on the extensive amateur contributions of Doctor Minor (a bibliophile and former surgeon serving life imprisonment in the Broadmoor lunatic asylum), Simon Winchester captures something of the immense logistical difficulties faced in putting together the first ever true English dictionary.