How long does it take to read The Dictionary of Lost Words?
Pip Williams
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams takes about 6 hours 45 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 45 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2021. 368 pages, about 101,200 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 15 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 45 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 13 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
