How does something so seemingly innocuous become something scandalous, or insulting, or crude. Why did they become those things, and who rewrote their meanings? Who decides what is to be written down and immortalized and why are some words left out? Who speaks those words? Why don't their voices get to be remembered? These are the questions that plague Esme Nicoll as she goes from playing under the sorting table in the Scriptorium to creating her own Dictionary of Lost Words.