The Gendered Exclusion of Women's Words in The Dictionary of Lost Words

The Thematic Claim: What the Dictionary Could Not Hear in The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams — Theme Analysis of the Gendered Exclusion of Women's Words, with Study Questions and Answers for Students and Book Clubs. Explore how the OED's method, male editors, and reliance on written sources systematically omitted women's words, and how Esme's trunk becomes a counter-archive. Includes character and symbol connections, complexity, and 5 study questions with answers. Internal links to character and symbol guides included. This analysis is grounded in the novel's plot and the Author's Note. Word count: approximately 1,500 words. ## The Thematic Claim: What the Dictionary Could Not Hear. The Dictionary of Lost Words argues that the Oxford English Dictionary's founding method—collecting written quotations, mostly from published books by men, and adjudicating them through an all-male editorial staff—produced a record of English that was systematically skewed. Words and meanings central to women's lives, from domestic labour to bodily experience, were omitted not because they were unimportant but because the dictionary's machinery had no way to see them. The novel's central question, posed in the Author's Note, is whether words mean different things to men and women and whether something was lost in defining them. Pip Williams's answer is that the first edition was a flawed and gendered text, and the novel dramatises that flaw through Esme's parallel collection of discarded slips. ## The Scriptorium's Exclusionary Logic. The prologue establishes the hierarchy of words. Esme, a young child on her father's lap, watches him sort slips. A slip reading Lily—her mother's name—is set aside because a name must mean something to be included, and the slip lacks a full quotation. Three slips are thrown into the fire grate. Esme's scream and her burned hand, reaching into the flames, literalise the violence of exclusion: some words matter more than others, and the child learns this lesson on her skin. The bondmaid incident in May 1887 deepens the pattern. A slip falls from the sorting table, and Esme keeps it. When she shows it to Lizzie, the Murrays' maid, Lizzie recognises herself: she is bound to serve the Murrays till the day she dies. The word's definition—a slave girl, or a bonded servant—describes Lizzie's condition, yet the dictionary's process would have excluded it had Esme not intercepted it. Later, in August 1901, a reader writes to Dr. Murray because bondmaid is missing from the A-B volume. The letter-writer assumes it was an accidental omission, but the novel suggests otherwise: the word's absence reflects a system that did not register the lives of women like Lizzie as worthy of record. Lizzie's response is telling: dictionary or no, bondmaids will always exist. The word is true whether or not the dictionary acknowledges it. Ditte's letter to Esme in August 1901 makes the mechanism explicit. Every word must have a textual source, and those sources largely come from books written by men. Words in common use that were never written down would necessarily be excluded. Ditte concedes the problem—if the words of one group are considered worthier of preservation than those of another—but offers no solution. The dictionary's method, designed for completeness, structurally cannot hear the voices it never invited. ## The Trunk as Counter-Archive. Esme's trunk, hidden under Lizzie's bed, becomes the novel's counter-archive. In May 1887, Esme and Lizzie find a hat pin hidden under the trunk's lining; in August 1893, Esme uses that same pin to scratch The Dictionary of Lost Words into the lid, bending the pin beyond repair. The act is both homage and defiance: Esme is building a dictionary of her own, one that preserves what the Scriptorium discards. The trunk holds clumsy words with poorly transcribed quotations that would never end up in the Dictionary, and nonce words that never made it—the detritus of the official process, rescued from the discard basket. The trunk's contents grow to include words from women's speech: Lizzie's knackered, Mabel's words, and the word Esme writes herself in May 1909—cunt, defined as slang for vagina and an insult based on the premise that a woman's vagina is vulgar. Esme's decision to write this definition is a direct challenge to the dictionary's prudish exclusions. When she proposes a dictionary of women's words, Lizzie objects that some of them isn't fit, and Esme replies that Dr. Murray's dictionary leaves things out; if it isn't written down, it doesn't even get considered. The trunk is the material answer to that problem: a place where women's words are written down, considered, and preserved. ## Women's Words and Institutional Rejection. The novel's climax for this theme comes in September 1915, when Esme's Women's Words and Their Meanings is finally printed. Lizzie finds her own entry—knackered—and recites it from memory, word-perfect. The moment is triumphant: a housemaid's speech, recorded verbatim, preserved in print. But the triumph is immediately undercut. At the Bodleian, Mr. Madan rejects the volume as of no scholarly importance. Esme's protest—that it fills a gap in knowledge, and surely that is the purpose of scholarship—is met with the institutional shrug of a man who cannot see the gap because he does not share the experience of being excluded from it. The scene dramatises the novel's central irony: even when women's words are collected and printed, the institutions that define knowledge refuse to recognise them. ## Characters and the Cost of Exclusion. The theme runs through nearly every major character. Esme is the collector, the one who absorbs the Scriptorium's logic as a child and spends her life building an alternative. Lizzie is the living proof of what the dictionary misses: her labour, her speech, her body are all invisible to the official record, yet she is the one who recognises herself in bondmaid and who insists that true words exist whether or not they are recorded. Ditte—Edith Thompson, based on the real historical volunteer—is the bridge between the official dictionary and Esme's counter-archive. Her letter about forgiven-ness, a word rejected from the dictionary, shows that even dedicated women contributors could not always get their words in. Dr. Murray is the sympathetic but limited gatekeeper: he is not malicious, but his method is the problem. The Author's Note confirms that the real Murray's garden-party speech is quoted verbatim, and that the first edition was far less flawed and gendered than it might have been in the hands of someone other than James Murray—a qualified defence that acknowledges the system's bias without demonising the man. ## Symbols of Loss and Recovery. The trunk is the novel's central symbol: a private archive that mirrors the public dictionary but preserves what the dictionary discards. The bondmaid slip is the emblematic lost word—a word that should have been included, whose absence a reader noticed, and whose recovery in Esme's trunk becomes the seed of her life's work. The dictionary slips themselves are the raw material of both archives: identical in form, but radically different in what they record. The hat pin, bent in the act of carving the trunk's title, symbolises the cost of Esme's project—the tool of women's domestic life, sacrificed to create a record of women's words. Women's Words and Their Meanings, the printed volume that Meg discovers in 1928, is the culmination: a book that exists, that was printed, that Lizzie can hold in her hands, even if the Bodleian will not shelve it. ## Complexity and Contradiction. The novel is careful not to present a simple villain. Dr. Murray is genuinely committed to the dictionary's completeness; the Author's Note credits him with making the first edition far less flawed and gendered than it might have been. The exclusion is systemic, not personal. Ditte's letter acknowledges the problem but sees no solution within the dictionary's method. Lizzie herself is ambivalent: she is glad to be in the dictionary, but she also says bondmaids will always exist whether or not the word is recorded. And Esme's own project is not without its complications—Lizzie worries that some words isn't fit, and Esme must decide whether to record women's speech as it is spoken or as it should be. The novel's final note, that the OED is a work in progress, suggests that the exclusion is not permanent but historical—and that the dictionary, like the language it records, can change. ## Study Questions and Answers. 1. How does the novel define the difference between a word that is lost and a word that is excluded? A lost word is one that falls through the cracks—like bondmaid, which was accidentally omitted and later noticed by a reader. An excluded word is one the dictionary's method cannot accommodate: words without written sources, words from working-class speech, words for women's bodily experience. The novel suggests that the line between the two is blurry, and that what looks like accident is often the predictable result of a system that only listens to certain voices. 2. Why does Lizzie recognise herself in the word bondmaid, and what does this reveal about the dictionary's blind spots? Lizzie sees that the definition—a slave girl, or a bonded servant—describes her own condition as a housemaid bound to serve the Murrays. The word's absence from the dictionary is not just a clerical error; it reflects a system that did not consider Lizzie's life worthy of record. Her recognition shows that the dictionary's omissions are not abstract but personal: real people are erased when their words are not preserved. 3. What role does Ditte play in Esme's understanding of the dictionary's exclusions? Ditte is the first adult to explain the mechanism to Esme: words must have written sources, and those sources are mostly by men. She also models the problem—her forgiven-ness slip was rejected—and she encourages Esme's curiosity rather than dismissing it. Ditte's letters are the intellectual thread that connects Esme's childhood observations to her adult project. 4. Why does the Bodleian reject Women's Words and Their Meanings, and what does this scene reveal about institutional power? Mr. Madan rejects the volume as of no scholarly importance because it was not compiled by a scholar and does not fit the library's definition of significance. The scene shows that exclusion operates at multiple levels: even when women's words are collected and printed, the institutions that define knowledge can refuse to recognise them. Esme's protest—that the book fills a gap in knowledge—is the novel's argument in miniature. 5. How does the novel complicate the idea that the dictionary's exclusions are simply the fault of individual men? The novel shows Dr. Murray as a sympathetic figure who is genuinely committed to completeness, and the Author's Note credits him with making the first edition less biased than it might have been. The exclusion is systemic: it comes from the method of relying on written sources, the demographics of who wrote those sources, and the institutional assumptions about what counts as knowledge. The novel's final image of the OED as a work in progress suggests that the problem is historical and can be addressed—not by blaming individuals, but by changing the system. For a broader overview, return to the book home page.