“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?” Pip Williams poses searching questions in a spellbinding novel that begins in the 1880s with a small child under a table in James Murray’s north Oxford garden shed; she recognises the various people by their shoes and socks.
Murray and his fellow lexicographers are real, compiling entries for the Oxford English Dictionary on small slips of paper. Motherless Esme, the child who hoards dropped slips in her treasure trunk, is fictional but is a way of drawing attention to a word that really was inadvertently omitted in the first edition of the OED: “bondmaid”. So we follow Esme
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