Dictionary Days

Born in Mexico of Jewish descent with Eastern European origins and a fluent speaker of six languages, Ilan Stavans has interests as varied as his background. In Dictionary Days, he offers an entertaining and knowledgeable tour of language inspired by his lifelong obsession with dictionaries. He follows a fascinating, zigzagging history of lexicography across many languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Cyrillic. In these essays, he shares illuminating and amusing anecdotes about the history of words and their meaning across cultures and continents. Throughout his journey, Stavans spots strange meaning inconsistencies, uncovers unusual origins, and shares extraordinary and often hilarious anecdotes.

With a dazzling knowledge of dictionaries through the ages, matched with a lively wit, award-winning essayist Stavans reaches far beyond the margin of the page and pays a worthy tribute to a discipline that is at once inspiring and maddening. “For dictionaries are oracles: nothing is outside them—except the impossible.”