The Liar's Dictionary

"This clever first novel is a beguiling dual love story about how language and people intersect and connect – the joy of lex. A century apart, two lexicographers beaver away in London on the same unfinished Encyclopedic Dictionary. Peter Winceworth, stuck working on the S’s in 1899, rues the English language’s lamentable gaps, and has a habit of fabricating words that might fill them, such as “procrastinattering” about the weather. A hundred years later, an intern named Mallory is hired to update definitions and weed out any bogus entries, aka Mountweazels. The intertwining plotlines build to an explosive climax that raises questions about the instability of language, how words gain currency, and whether fake words are any less real than actual words."