Is there a word for a book you would probably have given up on if it weren't so short? How about a word for when whimsy becomes too much of a good thing?

This book had such a creative and promising premise but it did not deliver. I liked the modern day storyline a lot more than the historical one, but still, both were prone to so much rambling that it became a chore to read. A few really beautiful passages were nestled in among the blah, plus a sweet relationship in Mallory and Pip, but not enough to make this enjoyable. Wes Anderson might be into adapting it, though.

If you’re a satire-loving “word nerd” (and especially one who enjoys the humor in wordplay), you just might love “The Liar’s Dictionary” by Eley Williams.

It’s a completely odd, laugh-out-loud tale of two worlds colliding at the workplace—a century apart.

In 1899, Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer working for Swansby's, a London-based dictionary publisher. His job is to edit words that begin with “S.” But he becomes apathetic and decides to “spice things up” and leave his mark on the world, at least in print.

Then in present-day life, we follow a day-in-the-life of Mallory, a queer intern hired to “digitize” the unfinished volumes. (Which, by the way, haven’t been updated in eons). As one of two employees left at the failing dictionary company, she’s tasked with finding all of the “mountweazels” before the work gets published online. Mallory and her girlfriend, Pip, try to figure out who was behind these crazy made up words.

The Liar’s Dictionary is so bizarre and lovable. It’s chock-full of wordplay and I really did “LOL” several times, particularly while reading the chapters about Mallory. She’s sarcastic as is Pip. They are a darling couple. On the other hand, I found myself a tad bit underwhelmed by Winceworth’s storyline, which is why this is only 3 stars for me. (I only loved half the book).


Special thanks to Doubleday for an advanced copy of the book, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review. Please note that I purchased a copy of the audiobook, narrated by Kristen Atherton and Jon Glover, and they did a superb job. With all of the words I didn’t know, it was very helpful (and entertaining) to hear their sarcastic British voices read what felt like a screenplay.

I don't write reviews of books I don't officially review. I officially reviewed this one:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955480798/the-liars-dictionary-is-a-clever-delight-for-language-lovers

I found this completely delightful! As you might expect from a story of two Lexicographers, it is VERY wordy but just so much fun! It’s erudite, yet silly... full of hilarious observations, clever wordplay, and charming characters. Full of fascinating etymology , I was imagining Stephen Fry as Winceworth and Sandy Toksvig as Mallory.... humor and smarts in perfect harmony. It’s a book to savor every wonderful word..... Loved it....

Although most of the books on my Clever shelf are there due to unusual publishing characteristics or unique narration (Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure, Ship of Theseus, Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal), this one merits inclusion due to Williams' invention of words that I constantly had to look up to see if they are 'real'. This book refreshed my contemplations over who brings words into languages and why they have any authority and why, as illustrated here, the creation of words so perfect for what they describe should just be happening everywhere, all the time, by anyone, with complete legitimacy.

I loved the writing, enjoyed the characters, found this witty and light and joyful. So, why three stars? Honestly, primarily because I mostly pressured myself throughout to keep reading. It's possible that, had I read this at a different time - of history, of year, of season, of frame of mind - it would've been easier to stay engaged. As it was, the humor and wittiness - the spine and draw of this book, for me - simply weren't enough to consistently compel me into the character's lives.

I will try Williams again, dependent on timing and synopsis, as there was nothing objectionable here, certainly, just unfortunately not enough to captivate.

ARC provided by Doubleday Books; thank you!!

I tried but I couldn't get into this book enough to read past the very dense prologue and first chapter. I am a word lover, but the narrator was unlikeable and it wasn't for me.

Perfect novel for lexicophiles out there. I enjoyed reading the stories of the two main characters and found both characters so endearing. I also appreciated the plentiful mountweazel words peppered throughout the book.

"Mountweazel - (n.) the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement."

100 years ago, a man called Swansby set out to create the most complete dictionary known to man, employing scores of staff to cross check and verify the words to be included. The multi-volume masterpiece was attempting to put rivals like Webster to shame. 100 years later, the so-called masterpiece is still a work in progress.

This dual narrative novel bounces between Winceworth, a Victorian lexicographer who feels unappreciated at work and begins to add his own words to the Swansby tomes, and Mallory, modern-day intern, the now sole employee of Swansby's dictionary effort, who upon discovering Winceworth's mountweazels, must now go through every word to verify its accuracy.

While this book is full of a myriad of multisyllabic morphemes that will surely delight any lover of the English language, it's more about two people in two different points in time struggling between the perception of themselves and who they actually are. A nice little book to wile away a few hours with.

*LINK GOES LIVE DECEMBER 30*

When I was younger I had a massive dictionary that was my pride and joy. This thing was huge and could have easily been incorporated into a workout routine to produce fantastic results. When I received it I made a goal to read it cover to cover – like a book. While that goal never came to fruition, I did spend countless hours poring over its pages, randomly pointing at new words to learn and work into my vocabulary. When I first came across THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY it sounded like a book written just for me: a past/present story set in the office of a dictionary publisher and the worker who learns that – oh my! – a former employee from generations ago had inserted his own made-up words into the dictionary!

Mallory is a young intern at Swansby’s Dictionary where she spends her days hurriedly eaten her hard boiled eggs and being plagued by threatening phone calls from an anonymous caller. Heaven knows why someone would choose a dictionary publisher of all business to target, but Mallory has been on edge, jumping whenever the phone rings. To get with the times, Swansby’s has made the decision to digitize their (still unfinished) dictionary, only it’s been discovered that a past employee had made up several words. Mallory’s tasked with finding these mountweazels and removing them before the dictionary goes online.

In the 19th Century, Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer for Swansby’s. In a seemingly heartless twist of fate, Peter oversees the S words – and is afflicted with a pronounced lisp. The irony is not lost on the crueler employees who delight in taunting and teasing Peter. …unbeknownst to the rest of Swansby’s however, Peter does not actually have a lisp, it’s all an act and now that act is appearing to catch up with him.

THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY could not have started off on a stronger foot – I was already highlighting passages in the preface! Unfortunately, as the novel wore on, it became a bit dull and I am beyond disappointed to say that. This sounded like a book tailormade for me! I was there for 19th Century London, I nodded enthusiastically to Peter’s words (relectoblivious (adj), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish) and honestly would happily read a book compiling his work (“Sometimes he just improvised little fictions in the style of an encyclopaedic entry. To this end, he made up some fourteenth-century dignitaries from Constantinople and a small religious sect living in the Japanese Alps.“) In the present day, I was intrigued by the threatening calls Mallory was receiving and her internal struggle over whether or not she should be fully out – her girlfriend Pip is out to everyone while Mallory is more selective; Pip is just a roommate as far as her coworkers and the general public are concerned.

So what went wrong? How did it take me two full weeks to read a book that was less than 300 pages? I…don’t really know. The author’s bio at the end of this book mentions membership to the Royal Society of Literature and it’s evident. She’s clearly a lover of words and the wordplay abounds in these pages…unfortunately to the detriment of plot and storytelling. I am glad I pushed on – there really are wonderful turns of phrase and beautifully written passages – but more than once I entertained the idea of abandoning this one altogether, namely during a chapter where there was a multi-page scene involving physical violence to a bird. It’s not until a few chapters later that it’s revealed the bird was choking on something and the commotion was an attempt to save its life. I wish this would have been immediately revealed or, better yet, left out entirely. I’m not sure if it was meant to be humorous, but it didn’t sit well with me at all and would have easily been a deciding factor in abandoning the book if I hadn’t decided to just start skimming the rest.

I do think THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY will be a pretty polarizing novel, already I’ve come across multiple early readers who abandoned it early on, while others are hailing it as a work of genius. I wanted to be floored by this one, wowed by it, but I enjoyed the thought of what it could be more than what it actually is.

Word nerds might already be familiar with the term mountweazel. A mountweazel is a fake entry put into dictionaries to stop people from copying and profiting off of someone else’s hard work. Mountweazels play a lot of different roles in Eley William’s clever novel, The Liar’s Dictionary. They act as metaphor as often as they appear as literal plot points. For me, the real fun in reading this novel was trying to work out which words were made up and which ones were real (if obscure) English words.

There are two plots in The Liar’s Dictionary. In the present, Mallory has an internship that managed to be simultaneously the world’s most boring job and the most alarming. She works at the remnants of Swansby’s publishing house. Swansby’s was once a rival to the great Oxford English Dictionary. They raced Oxford’s lexicographers for decades until World War I killed off their employees and took the metal from their presses. Swansby’s encyclopedic dictionary was sadly never finished. Decades later, the last member of the family ekes out a living renting out the more presentable parts of the building for events. Mallory is just there to answer the phone…and receive the daily bomb threat. Mallory is told that the calls come from someone upset about recent efforts to update Swansby’s definition of marriage, but she is strangely blasé about the calls—much to the alarm of her girlfriend. The other plot is set more than 100 years earlier, centered on lexicographer Peter Winceworth. Peter is an odd duck. He affects a lisp to annoy people (his boss sent him to an elocutionist) and he secretly makes up words for emotions and events that, ordinarily, can only be described in long phrases.

The mountweazels connect Peter and Mallory, although they don’t know who the other is. In the present, Mallory’s boss discovers the fake words in his efforts to digitize the dictionary. He puts her to work to try and find all of them. Peter never intended for anyone to find them. They’re just something he does while people talk over and around him. That faint connection offers a path to compare Peter and Mallory in their dead end jobs and their inability to move forward with their lives—as well as to meditate on the fact that all words are made up when you really think about it.

The Liar’s Dictionary felt undeveloped for me. This may be because the two protagonists have failed to launch, which definitely flavors the book. It might also have been because the mountweazels were little more than McGuffins. Perhaps it was also that the plots just ended (one in a twist I saw coming and the other with bizarre revelation) and we never got to see Mallory and Peter grow up. I wish I had had more time with this book’s words.

I love words. I grew up with a dictionary next to the table where we ate our meals, so this book was written for me. Based on the premise that a multi-volume dictionary written in the 1930’s was to be digitized with no update with new words, Mallory, who is the only employee of the dictionary’s London office. It is also the story of Winceworth, who lived 100 years ago and was in charge of the “S” section of the dictionary. It took me a while to figure out that the two narrators were living in different times. Winceworth, to stave off boredom, created made up words or mountweazels. As Mallory reads the dictionary in preparation for digitizing, she begins to sense Winceworth’s personality in the words he has made up. The characters are important in the story, but first and foremost it’s the exploration of language, words and meanings that take center stage. And while, I enjoyed the book, I found myself counting the number of pages until the end.

This is not a "read before bed" book - you have to pay attention. There is a past/present perspective that isn't always clear, lots of big words, and practices that are not familiar to American audiences. If that's your jam, then turn up the music on The Liar's Dictionary. You can add your own arm chair psychoanalysis (delusions of grandeur, perhaps?) and analyze characters who are searching for a place in the world, and, perhaps, history.

The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams has a really interesting premise & fairly likeable characters. Unfortunately, I just could not relate with any of the characters & could not get into the story itself. In as much as I share the author’s enthusiasm for words, her style and mine just do not seem to sync. Great technical writing skills shown in this book, but I could not get past chapter 4 unless I kept forcing myself to keep on reading. Also, if you are looking for a diverse set of characters, this book is not it.

The Liar's Dictionary is a fun read for anyone who loves words and dictionaries, and revels in learning new words, their meanings, and their origins. There are two intertwined stories - one that takes place in present day, and another that takes place in the late 1800's - at Swansby's Dictionary.

Swansby takes on the herculean task of creating an unabridged dictionary, and publishing it before others (like Oxford and Webster). Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer working on entries for the letter "S," and living a life of quiet despair. To amuse himself, he makes up fake words and defines them, but (at first) has no intention of adding them to the dictionary.

In the present day, Mallory is employed by the last living Swansby to help him digitize the Swansby's Dictionary, which was never completed. Once the "fake" words (known as mountweazels) are discovered, it is her job to find them and remove them from the dictionary before they publish the book online.

The appeal of this story is the playful use of words. You might actually need to have a good dictionary beside you to define all the words used in this book! Winceworth and Mallory both have a lot of angst and are interesting characters. The plot is decent, but what really shines through is the author's love of etymology and dictionaries as a literary form, not just as discovery tool.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

Fun at first because of all the wordplay, but it wore thin after a while and the plot never developed very much.

About a hundred years ago, Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer for an encyclopedic dictionary, dissatisfied and pretending to a lisp that threatens to become real. In the present, Mallory is an intern for the remnants of that same dictionary, working on a digitization project and trying to weed out the fake words planted by Winceworth in the past.

I really wanted to love this. The premise has promise! But I was disappointed. It takes a good 30% of the book to get past scene-setting to the primary plotlines, and then ends abruptly with nearly all ends left loose. Pity.

I love books about books, so I wish I had loved this sweet dictionary tale a bit more than I did. The story telling format is one that I really enjoyed, alternating chapters about the same dictionary publisher told 100 years apart, one a modern day disaster, the other a 1899 brand new business.
There are lots of fancy dictionary words in the narrative, some quirky characters, and a bit of mystery, but over all I felt it just didn't live up to its potential. I finished feeling unsatisfied and wanting more.
Obviously I'm in the minority, so you may want to read it for yourself!

My readers will love this book as much as I do! It was a beautiful story about words and people and relationships. I loved taking my time reading and can't wait to recommend!

Two story lines intertwine, that of a lonely and bored Victorian lexicographer working on a encyclopaedic dictionary and the other the present day intern turned some-what sleuth on his tracks. Winceworth has been inserting Montweazels (false entries) into the work. At times a bit tedious, at times funny, mostly interesting and at all times loaded with words that I had to look up...including Mountweazel. Luckily I was reading an ebook on my iPad and could just touch to load the definition, I probably would have given up otherwise. This is a very clever debut novel. I was good with the separate ending but wished there had been an ending with resolution...

I pre-ordered this book for myself before I finished the prologue. I waited until the next day to put it on my library's list, but that was only because I didn't have my computer with me.

This is delightful, witty and charming--our 19th century hero, Winceworth, and our 21st century heroine, Mallory, are vibrant, charming, and deeply realized. Playful without being frivolous, The Liar's Dictionary shows us how much we reveal and are revealed by our use of language.