The Dictionary of Lost Words Study Guide

Born in England, Pip Williams moved to Australia with her family in 1972, where she grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Though Williams was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 17, she maintained a love of reading throughout her youth. After graduating high school in 1987, Williams studied social sciences at the Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst. Passionate about social justice for elderly women in particular, she went on to earn a PhD in public health from the University of Adelaide. During her time as a social researcher at the University of South Australia, Williams co-authored Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today (2012) with Barbara Pocock and Natalie Skinner. In 2017, she published One Italian Summer, a nonfiction account of the months she and her family spent working on organic farms in Italy. Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020), won the General Fiction Book of the Year award in the Australian Book Industry Awards as well as the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Williams’s second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023), acts as a companion to her first. Williams has also served as a community planner for Adelaide City Council, where she assisted in the creation of the Adelaide City Library. As of 2024, William lives with her family in Adelaide Hills.

In 1857, the London Philological Society initiated the project that would become the Oxford English Dictionary after expressing dissatisfaction with existing English dictionaries. In 1879, lexicographer and philologist James Murray became the dictionary’s primary editor and began working on the project in an iron outbuilding he called the “Scriptorium,” which was lined with 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips. Oxford University Press agreed to publish the dictionary in installments until its completion in 1928, 13 years after Murray’s death. The dictionary’s progress depended heavily on the efforts of paid assistants as well as volunteers, including Edith and Elizabeth Thompson, who together submitted over 15,000 quotations for the A and B volume. The United Kingdom’s fight for women’s suffrage became a national movement in 1872 with the formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, led by Millicent Fawcett. After several years of peaceful but ineffective suffragist demonstrations, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. The members called themselves suffragettes and favored more militant and disruptive tactics of protest, including arson. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I caused suffrage efforts to stagnate as women committed themselves to the war effort. In 1928, the same year of the dictionary’s completion, the United Kingdom passed the Equal Franchise Act, giving all women over the age of 21 the right to vote.

Pip Williams’s second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023), acts as a companion to her first, this time following a young woman who works in the Oxford University Press bindery who longs to study the books she creates. For more insight into Williams’s inspiration for The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020), Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (1998) provides a nonfiction account of James Murray’s correspondence with a dictionary volunteer who was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane. Readers interested in the idiosyncrasies of language might enjoy The Liar’s Dictionary (2020) by Eley Williams, in which a publishing intern investigates the fictitious dictionary entries of a disaffected Victorian lexicographer. Bothayna Al-Essa’s 2024 novel The Book Censor’s Library imagines a dystopian world in which words are actively policed instead of neglected, exemplifying the problems of linguistic marginalization in a disturbing near-future context. For another perspective on the ways women leave their mark on historical events despite their marginalization, Robyn Cadwallader’s Book of Colours (2018) tells the story of a stationer’s shop creating an illuminated Book of Hours on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt in 14th-century London. Finally, Fiona Davis’s The Lions of Fifth Avenue (2020) explores the intersection of language and feminism as it follows two generations of women who work at the New York Public Library.