The Dictionary of Lost Words

The Play

Verity Laughton, Pip Williams

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English

Affirm Press
01 January 2025

Plays & playscripts; Historical fiction

In 1901, the word 'bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It's a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.

This is the official playscript of The Dictionary of Lost Words, the acclaimed stage adaptation of the beloved novel by Pip Williams.

By: Verity Laughton, Pip Williams
Imprint: Affirm Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 128mm,
Weight: 134g
ISBN: 9781923046870
ISBN 10: 192304687X
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 01 January 2025
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Verity Laughton is a South Australian-based playwright. Her work has been produced throughout Australia and internationally. Known for her versatility, she has written mainstage drama, a musical, adaptations and works for children, dance, radio and the screen. Her awards include AWGIE awards for Radio and Community Theatre, the Griffin and Inscription awards, and the Adelaide Critics Circle Best New Play. She has been nominated for the NSW Premier's Prize, the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, the New Dramatists Award, the Rodney Seaborn Award (twice), the STC Patrick White Award and the Griffin Theatre's Martin-Lysicrates Prize. Pip Williams is an Australian writer and social researcher. She has published research, essays, memoir and the odd poem, but she is best known for her companion novels The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho. Since its publication in 2020, The Dictionary of Lost Words has become an international bestseller. It has won a number of major Australian book awards, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the prestigious Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was chosen for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club and went on to be a New York Times bestseller. As well as being adapted for stage, The Dictionary of Lost Words is being turned into a book concerto and has been optioned for a limited series. Pip's second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, won the 2024 Australian Book Industry Award for general fiction book of the year. Pip's books have been published around the world and translated into more than thirty languages.