"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...

"An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent which chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world"--

"The Word Detective is John Simpson's memoir as the former Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Simpson takes us from his first encounter with the dictionary in the old-fashioned world of Oxford in 1976 through to his retirement as Chief Editor thirty-seven years later. Simpson introduces us to the dusty basement archives and the traditional OED afternoon tea ceremony, and recounts the personal adventures of a life well lived, from...

The story of "shy young Peter Mark Roget, [for whom] books were the best companions--and it wasn't long before Peter began writing his own book. But he didn't write stories; he wrote lists. Peter took his love for words and turned it to organizing ideas and finding exactly the right word to express just what he thought. His lists grew and grew, eventually turning into one of the most important reference books of all time"--Amazon.com.

It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story--a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship...

Peter Mark Roget--polymath, eccentric, synonym aficionado--was a complicated man. He was a scholar obsessed with his work, yet he had an allure that endeared him to his contemporaries--not to mention a host of female admirers. But most notably, he made lists. Roget longed for order in his chaotic world. His father's premature death and the mental illness of his mother and sister threatened to plunge him into his own madness. And so, at the age of...