The Property Council’s International Women’s Day lunch was a great opportunity for our Managing Director, Matt King, to celebrate women with the following words:
“In 1857, the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London had decided that Britain needed a successor to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. It had taken 40 years for the first volume – the letters A and B – to be published. But they still left out some words.
One of the missing words was “bondmaid”, and when author Pip Williams learned of its exclusion, she knew she had the makings of a novel.
The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of the Oxford English Dictionary’s compilation through the fictional character Esme, the daughter of one of the men working on it, and her interactions with characters based on the real men and women behind the Dictionary.
A bondmaid is a young woman bound to serve until her death. Uses of the word had been supplied by members of the public – an important part of how the dictionary was compiled. But the piece of paper showing the final definition is still missing from the archives today.
Pip says her novel began as two simple questions:
- Do words mean different things to men and women?
- And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?
From local suffragettes Esme learns that “sisters” can mean comrades. She puzzles over the definition of “mother” and whether it excludes a woman who has a stillbirth, or who gives her daughter up for adoption, or whose son dies in war.
Pip’s novel is a thought-provoking celebration of words, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.
Many of you may have already enjoyed reading the Dictionary of Lost Words. It’s author, Pip Williams, is just one of the remarkable women to have worked at URPS.
Thank you Pip for making us conscious of how some of the simplest of things can be gender-biased and worth changing.
Thank you also to all the women we work with who add so much to our lives”.
