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Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Brimming with intelligence and personality, a vastly entertaining account of how dictionaries are made - a must read for word mavens. Have you ever tried to define the word "is?" Do you have strong feelings about the word (and, yes, it is a word) "irregardless?" Did you know that OMG was first used in 1917, in a letter to Winston Churchill? These are the questions that keep lexicographers up at night. While most of us might take dictionaries for...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Dictionary of Lost Words is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Before the lost word, there was another. It arrived at the Scriptorium in a second-hand envelope, the old address crossed out and Dr Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place. It was Da's job to open the post and...
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of "shy young Peter Mark Roget, [for whom] books were the best companions--and it wasn't long before Peter began writing his own book. But he didn't write stories; he wrote lists. Peter took his love for words and turned it to organizing ideas and finding exactly the right word to express just what he thought. His lists grew and grew, eventually turning into one of the most important reference books of all time"--Amazon.com.
Author
Language
English
Description
A New York Times Notable Book
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history.
The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray,
...Author
Language
English
Description
"An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent which chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world"--
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. When her mother phones, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found...
Author
Publisher
AmazonCrossing
Pub. Date
2017.
Physical Desc
212 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
"Inspired as a boy by the multiple meanings to be found for a single word in the dictionary, Kohei Araki is devoted to the notion that a dictionary is a boat to carry us across the sea of words. But after thirty-seven years creating them at Gembu Books, it's time for him to retire and find his replacement. He discovers a kindred spirit in Mitsuya Majime--a young, disheveled square peg with a penchant for collecting antiquarian books and a background...
Author
Publisher
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Pub. Date
c2010
Physical Desc
xii, 355 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
From the author of "The Man Who Made Lists" comes an absorbing biography of Noah Webster, whose name is synonymous with the dictionary he created, but whose life story is not nearly so ubiquitous
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2023.
Physical Desc
x, 370 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
For the first time ever, this thrilling literary detective story, doubling as a celebration of words, language, people and one of mankind's greatest achievements, unravels the mystery of the contributors from around the world who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read, write and speak.
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2012
Physical Desc
1 v. (unpaged) : col. ill. ; 22 x 28 cm.
Language
English
Description
A portrait of the man who wrote the first U.S. dictionary traces his youth as a bookish Connecticut farm boy and his twenty-year effort to write the all-American dictionary that was published in 1828 when he was seventy years old
Publisher
Vertical Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2019]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (124 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.
Author
Publisher
Harper Audio
Pub. Date
p1998
Physical Desc
6 sound discs (450 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
When editors of the "Oxford English dictionary" put out a call during the late 19th century for "men of letters" to contribute entries, hundreds of responses came forth.
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