The Dictionary of Lost Words
Pip Williams
For Ma and Pa
Before the lost word, there was another. It arrived at the Scriptorium in a second-hand envelope, the old address crossed out and Dr Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place.
It was Da’s job to open the post and mine to sit on his lap, like a queen on her throne, and help him ease each word out of its folded cradle. He’d tell me what pile to put it on and sometimes he’d pause, cover my hand with his, and guide my finger up and down and around the letters, sounding them into my ear. He’d say the word, and I would echo it, then he’d tell me what it meant.
This word was written on a scrap of brown paper, its edges rough where it had been torn to match Dr Murray’s preferred dimensions. Da paused, and I readied myself to learn it. But his hand didn’t cover mine, and when I turned to hurry him, the look on his face made me stop; as close as we were, he looked far away.
I turned back to the word and tried to understand. Without his hand to guide me, I traced each letter.
‘What does it say?’ I asked.
‘Lily,’ he said.
‘Like Mamma?’
‘Like Mamma.’
‘Does that mean she’ll be in the Dictionary?’
‘In a way, yes.’
‘Will we all be in the Dictionary?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
I felt myself rise and fall on the movement of his breath.
‘A name must mean something to be in the Dictionary.’
I looked at the word again. ‘Was Mamma like a flower?’ I asked.
Da nodded. ‘The most beautiful flower.’
He picked up the word and read the sentence beneath it. Then he turned it over, looking for more. ‘It’s incomplete,’ he said. But he read it again, his eyes flicking back and forth as if he might find what was missing. He put the word down on the smallest pile.
Da pushed his chair back from the sorting table. I climbed off his lap and readied myself to hold the first pile of slips. This was another job I could help with, and I loved to see each word find its place among the pigeon-holes. He picked up the smallest pile, and I tried to guess where Mamma would go. ‘Not too high and not too low,’ I sang to myself. But instead of putting the words in my hand, Da took three long steps towards the fire grate and threw them into the flames.
There were three slips. When they left his hand, each was danced by the draft of heat to a different resting place. Before it had even landed, I saw lily begin to curl.
I heard myself scream as I ran towards the grate. I heard Da bellow my name. The slip was writhing.
I reached in to rescue it, even as the brown paper charred and the letters written on it turned to shadows. I thought I might hold it like an oak leaf, faded and winter-crisp, but when I wrapped my fingers around the word, it shattered.
I might have stayed in that moment forever, but Da yanked me away with a force that winded. He ran with me out of the Scriptorium and plunged my hand into the snow. His face was ashen, so I told him it didn’t hurt, but when I unfurled my hand, the blackened shards of the word were stuck to my melted skin.
Some words are more important than others – I learned this, growing up in the Scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.
Scriptorium. It sounds as if it might have been a grand building, where the lightest footstep would echo between marble floor and gilded dome. But it was just a shed, in the back garden of a house in Oxford.
Instead of storing shovels and rakes, the shed stored words. Every word in the English language was written on a slip of paper the size of a postcard. Volunteers posted them from all over the world, and they were kept in bundles in the hundreds of pigeon-holes that lined the shed walls. Dr Murray was the one who named it the Scriptorium – he must have thought it an indignity for the English language to be stored in a garden shed – but everyone who worked there called it the Scrippy. Everyone but me. I liked the feel of Scriptorium as it moved around my mouth and landed softly between my lips. It took me a long time to learn to say it, and when I finally did nothing else would do.
Da once helped me search the pigeon-holes for scriptorium. We found five slips with examples of how the word had been used, each quotation dating back little more than a hundred years. All of them were more or less the same, and none of them referred to a shed in the back garden of a house in Oxford. A scriptorium, the slips told me, was a writing room in a monastery.
But I understood why Dr Murray had chosen it. He and his assistants were a little like monks, and when I was five it was easy to imagine the Dictionary as their holy book. When Dr Murray told me it would take a lifetime to compile all the words, I wondered whose. His hair was already as grey as ash, and they were only halfway through B.
Da and Dr Murray had been teachers together in Scotland long before there was a scriptorium. And because they were friends, and because I had no mother to care for me, and because Da was one of Dr Murray’s most trusted lexicographers, everyone turned a blind eye when I was in the Scriptorium.
The Scriptorium felt magical, like everything that ever was and ever could be had been stored within its walls. Books were piled on every surface. Old dictionaries, histories and tales from long ago filled the shelves that separated one desk from another, or created a nook for a chair. Pigeon-holes rose from the floor to the ceiling. They were crammed full of slips, and Da once said that, if I read every one, I’d understand the meaning of everything.