Esme Nicoll Owen

Esme Nicoll is the narrator and the protagonist of the novel. She spends nearly her entire life around the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Her father works on this project, and she spends much of her early years hanging around the Scriptorium where the work occurs. She begins collecting words that people drop. The first she collects is the word, “bondmaid.”

She has an interesting perspective on the OED as she is a young girl and then a woman working on the dictionary but without much authority or autonomy. She does not have a strong education like some of the other lexicographer’s daughters, but nevertheless, she makes a name for herself, gradually working her way up so that by the time many of the men leave for the war, she is quite needed at the Scriptorium. She spends most of her life considering words...