New York Times Bestseller. Reese'S Book Club Pick. and Delightful . . . a captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded. and The New York Times Book Review and A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress. and Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means and slave girl, and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary- the Dictionary of Lost Words.