While previous books have explored the lives of the OED's most famous editors, Sarah Ogilvie takes a magnifying glass to its lesser-known contributors—those volunteers who submitted words without hope of recognition or recompense. This catalog of "lunatics", murderers, teetotalers, and Shakespeare aficionados teems with strange facts and surprising anecdotes—Jane Austen's additions to the English language include the words "outsiders," chaperone," "irrepressible," and "doorbell"—dispensed with a love of the obscure and absurd. What shines in these pages is not only a love of words but the people behind them.