'This is a story about words, but not just any words. Pip Williams's novel The Dictionary of Lost Words centers around the creation of the English language's most famous collection of words: The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. Self-proclaimed as "the definitive record of the English language," today this dictionary contains over six hundred thousand words, boasts three and a half million quotations that help define these words, and represents over one thousand years of the English language.' (Introduction)