Adam Jacot De Boinod. Wonder of Whiffling. London, Particular Books, 2009.

While I was working on my last two books, scouring libraries and second hand bookshops, riffling through reference books from around the world to find words with unusual and delightful meanings, I kept coming across splendid English dictionaries too. Not just the mighty twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, but all kinds of collections covering dialect, jargon, slang and subsidiary areas, such as Jamaican or Newfoundland English. My passion for the arcane was renewed as I confronted the remarkable wealth of words in our language, from its origins in Anglo-Saxon, through Old and Middle English and Tudor-Stuart, then on to the rural dialects collected so lovingly by Victorian lexicographers, the argot of nineteenth-century criminals, slang from the two world wars, right up to contemporary life and the jargon that has grown up around such diverse activities as darts, birding and working in an office. When I was offered the chance, it seemed only right to gather the best examples together and complete my trilogy: bringing, as it were, the original idea home.