Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves’ slang from Queen Anne’s reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk.

Mark Forsyth

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