Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Motherless, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip, and is told that the word means "slave girl." Learning that words relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded, Esme begins...
Author
Publisher
Clarion Books
Pub. Date
[2015]
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 7.9 - AR Pts: 6
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A biography on Noah Webster, a controversial political activist, the primary shaper of the American language, and author of the Blue-Backed Spellers and the famous dictionary that bears his name. Illustrated with black-and-white archival images"--
Author
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
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...
5) The word detective: searching for the meaning of it all at the Oxford English Dictionary : a memoir
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"What do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? Can you drink a glass of balderdash? And if, serendipitously, you find yourself in Serendip, then where exactly are you? The answers to all of these questions can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments, its quirks, and its quiddities than the former chief editor of the OED,...
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
Pub. Date
2012
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 1
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.
Author
Publisher
Calkins Creek
Pub. Date
c2009
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 7 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Description
Presents the life and accomplishments of the American lexicographer, who wrote the first American dictionary, published the first daily newspaper, created the first American insurance company, and was responsible for the first copyright law.
Author
Publisher
Henry Holt and Co
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
In this portrait of Samuel Johnson, David Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work. This biography addresses his life and action through the hitherto unexplored perspectives of such major players as Johnson's wife, Tetty; Hester Thrale, in whose household he resided for seventeen years while working...
Author
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
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
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Peter Winceworth, a disaffected Victorian lexicographer, inserts false entries into a dictionary - violating and subverting the dictionary's authority - in an attempt to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom. In the present day, Mallory, a young overworked and underpaid intern employed by the dictionary's publishing house, is tasked with uncovering these entries before the work is digitised. As the novel progresses and their...
Author
Publisher
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Pub. Date
2014.
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 4.1 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Children's Awards: Caldecott Honor for Quality Illustrations
Children's Awards: Sibert Medal for Nonfiction
Children's Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Children's Awards: Sibert Medal for Nonfiction
Children's Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Description
Examines the life of Peter Mark Roget and his invention of the thesaurus.
Publisher
Vertical Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2019]
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.
Interlibrary Loans
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Arcadia Public Library can be requested from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request