It amuses me that this book about the dictionary is written in a very wordy style, enough so that I forgive Winchester for dragging things out a wee bit too long. A fascinating story indeed, especially for a lexicography buff like myself.

Even someone who's never given a second thought to the dictionary may well enjoy this book. I suggested it to customer even before having read it myself; his enthusiasm and profuse thanks compelled me to move it up on my To Be Read list!

It's a quick read (albeit one with many marvelous words not often encountered these days)and I recommend it to anyone looking for a bit of history, and a fun reality-check with regard to the origins of the online dictionaries and phone apps we rely upon these days! ( )

I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: "Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?" and "Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like 'typewriter' and 'schizophrenia'?" and "The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?"

The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning -- the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.

Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with "monomacy" for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book. ( )

The title says it all, and the author delivers it. Fantastic book. ( )

Okay style of writing. Feels like the story could have come through the pages more vividly. Quite the storyline thought! ( )

Having read books by Pip Williams this is specific to a key contributor of the Oxford English Dictionary that required slips with a word and an example from texts of its meaning. A Dr W C Minor contributed significantly to this process and for 17 year he had not actually met with Dr Murray who was leading the Scriptoriums' project in London. This is a remarkable collection of research about Dir Minor and compliments The Dictionary of Lost Words and the Bookbinder of Jericho - both released 21-13 in South Australia