Motherless and ever curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium – the “Scrippy”, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. She hides beneath the table and catches discarded words as they fall – words the men find irrelevant and unimportant … female words. Here begins Esme’s collection of her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words.

As the years pass and Esme’s world expands and her circle of friends grows – actresses, suffragettes, market traders, workers, she realises the power in gathering their voices, and lending hers. And on the way, she comes to understand the many meanings of the word “love”.