Reading The Oxford English Dictionary

`If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on. I have read the OED so you don`t have to…` Ammon Shea spent a year reading the 21,730 pages of the world’s most exhaustive, exhausting dictionary (there are over 60,000 words on the various meanings of ‘set’) and this book is a personal and very funny account of his year lost inside its 20 volumes, it is also the year his girlfriend moves in and all kinds of other life-changing things happen. The book is divided into 26 chapters, one per letter of the alphabet: each is half narrative and half a collection of his favourite words. These span from the incredibly useful (unlove – to cease loving someone, and parabore – a defence against bores) to the downright bizarre (lant – to make ale stronger with urine, and natiform – shaped like buttocks) and take in the eight different kinds of drunkenness and all kinds of other strangely memorable information along the way.