The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published.
Some of the language it recorded was still spoken-but much had fallen into disuse. There, I was shown a “Peat Glossary”: a word-list of the hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland that stretches over much of Lewis’s interior. One such trove turned up on the moors of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2007. Now and then I have hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular dictionaries or extraordinary people-troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages. For over a decade I have been collecting place-words: gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences, or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper.
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