"The Dictionary of Lost Words is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Before the lost word, there was another. It arrived at the Scriptorium in a second-hand envelope, the old address crossed out and Dr Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place. It was Da's job to open the post and...

Mountweazel n. the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer in Victorian-era London, toiling away at the letter 'S' for a multi-volume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Secretly, he begins to insert unauthorized fictitious entries into the dictionary in an attempt to assert some artistic freedom. In the present day, Mallory is a young...

"Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. When her mother phones, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found...

Describes the life and times of the man made famous for writing the first dictionary of the English language.

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language—"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"—and pays homage to the great dictionary

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"Noah Webster may be best remembered the enormous and ambitious task of writing his famous dictionary, but for him, this accomplishment was a means to an end. His true goal was to streamline the language spoken in our newly formed country so that it could be used as a force to bring people together and be a source of national pride. Though people laughed at his ideas, Webster never doubted himself. In the end, his so-called foolish notions achieved...

The dusty files of a venerable dictionary publisher ... a hidden cache of coded clues ... a story written by a phantom author ... an unsolved murder in a gritty urban park - all collide memorably in Emily Arsenault's magnificent debut at once a teasing literary puzzle an ingenious suspense novel and an exploration of definitions: of words of who we are and of the stories we choose to define us.

In this portrait of Samuel Johnson, David Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work. This biography addresses his life and action through the hitherto unexplored perspectives of such major players as Johnson's wife, Tetty; Hester Thrale, in whose household he resided for seventeen years while working...

"A picture book biography of Noah Webster"--