In 1901, the word 'bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It's a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.
This is the official playscript of The Dictionary of Lost Words, the acclaimed stage adaptation of the beloved novel by Pip Williams.
About the Authors
Verity Laughton is a South Australia–based playwright. Her work has been produced throughout Australia and internationally. Known for her versatility, she has written mainstage drama, a musical, adaptations and works for children, dance, radio and the screen. Her awards include AWGIE awards for Radio and Community Theatre, the Griffin and Inscription awards, and the Adelaide Critics Circle Best New Play. She has been nominated for the NSW Premier's Prize, the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, the New Dramatists Award, the Rodney Seaborn Award (twice), the STC Patrick White Award and the Griffin Theatre's Martin-Lysicrates Prize.
Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family's travels in search of the good life, which was published by Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, was published in 2020 and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho is her second novel, a companion to The Dictionary of Lost Words, and again combines her talent for historical research and beautiful storytelling.
