Book Club Discussion Guide for The Dictionary of Lost Words
I run a fairly regular book club and we read The Dictionary of Lost Words last spring. Getting people to actually engage with it beyond "oh yeah, words are interesting" takes some work, so I ended up putting together a set of questions that actually gets people talking. Here is how I approach it. The novel follows Esme, a girl born in 1917 into the world of the Oxford English Dictionary compilation. The setting itself is the hook, but the book covers a lot of ground, so narrowing down what to discuss matters. I start the conversation by asking people to think about the gap between language as something official and language as something lived. That tends to get the most honest responses. Here are the questions I use, roughly in the order I ask them during a meeting.
What do you think Pip Williams is saying about who gets to define words? The lexicographers in the book treat language like something sacred and controlled, while the women around them use words in ways the dictionary never records. I always ask this first because it surfaces the central tension of the book without feeling like a test question. People usually bring up Esme's secret garden of magazines and the way she collects words that don't belong to the "proper" canon. That is where the real discussion starts. How does the book treat the relationship between mothers and daughters? Esme's relationship with her mother Lottie is the emotional core, and Lottie's own story with her daughter Sibyl mirrors it in different ways. I find that readers have strong opinions about whether Lottie protected Esme or failed her. Both readings are valid, and the conversation usually gets warm pretty quickly. One thing I noticed running multiple discussions is that people tend to side with whichever mother they relate to most personally, which says more about the reader than the character, honestly. What role does secrecy play in the novel? The OED compendium basement is itself a secret world, and almost every major character is hiding something. Esme hides her sexuality, her father hides his identity as a journalist and spy, Sissy hides her past, and the whole enterprise of the dictionary hides the contributions of hundreds of women who never got credit. I always push people to name the different kinds of secrets, because the book distinguishes between protective secrecy and destructive secrecy, and they are not the same thing.
Is Esme a good protagonist? She can be frustrating. She spends a large portion of the book being passive, letting other people make decisions for her, and making choices based on fear rather than desire. I have found that readers split cleanly on this question, and the split usually reveals something about what they expect from female protagonists in historical fiction. Some people think her growth arc earns the ending. Others think the book asks too much sympathy from readers for someone who rarely takes real agency until the final third. Neither position is wrong, and the argument between them is where the best discussion lives. How important is the historical research to the novel's success? The OED project is real, and Williams includes actual entries, real lexicographers, and accurate timelines. But the book also takes liberties with how language was studied and who participated. One edge case I ran into that I still think about: a member of my club fact-checked a scene and found that the publication date for one of the appendices Williams references was off by a couple of years. It did not change the reading experience for anyone, but it made me realize that historical fiction readers sometimes bring a different kind of attention to detail than the author anticipated. I stopped trying to correct people on minor inaccuracies after that. The book is fiction, and its emotional truth matters more than perfect archival compliance. What does the title mean to you? Some people take it literally as a reference to the OED itself, which is a dictionary of lost meanings and forgotten usages. Others read it as about the words that Esme's mother used in secret, the slang and coded language of queer women and working-class communities that were never indexed. Both readings work, and I think Williams intends both. This question tends to be the one that brings the quietest people in the room into the conversation, probably because it does not require a right answer.
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How did the structure affect your reading? The book is told through OED entries interspersed with narrative chapters. Some readers find this device clever. Others find it interrupts emotional momentum. I have seen both reactions, and they are legitimate. The format mirrors the theme of language as architecture, but it can also feel academic when the emotional scenes need room to breathe. That is a design choice, not a flaw, but it is worth noting if your group struggles with the framing device. Who is the most underrated character in the novel? This is my favorite late-discussion question because it forces people to reconsider characters they initially dismissed. Sissy gets a lot of airtime but very little sympathy from other characters in the book, and readers often mirror that pattern. Digging into why Sissy is hard to like tends to reveal something about how the novel treats disability and dependency. If you could add one word to the dictionary that Pip Williams left out, what would it be and why? This question sounds playful but it usually produces surprisingly sharp observations about what the book omits. People suggest words related to queerness, to colonialism, to class, to the invisible labor of the women who proofread and compiled entries. It turns the OED project back on itself in a way that keeps the discussion moving.
I should mention one practical thing about running this particular book club discussion. The novel is long, and people come to the conversation at different levels of engagement. Some read every footnote. Others breezed through it over a weekend. I stopped trying to level the playing field and instead designed questions that work whether someone read closely or read casually. Questions about character motivation and thematic patterns do not require detailed recall, while questions about specific OED entries reward close reading without punishing people who missed them. One common mistake I see book club leaders make with this book is letting the discussion stay too focused on the romance plot. The love story is there, but it is not the point. The book is about language, power, and who gets heard. If your group drifts toward romantic speculation, steering them back to the question of whose words count and whose do not usually reenergizes the conversation. For people organizing their own discussion, I recommend printing the questions rather than reading them off a screen. It sounds minor, but having a physical sheet changes the rhythm of the meeting. People stop looking at you for the next question and start looking at each other. That shift is the difference between a guided interview and an actual conversation.
The book is available wherever books are sold, and the discussion questions above are freely reusable. No need to attribute them, though it is nice if you do. Happy reading.
