The Last Page of the Dictionary: On the Words We Never Use
I found it in a second-hand bookshop, tucked away on a bottom shelf where the dust had settled into a soft, grey blanket. It was a massive, cloth-bound dictionary from 1957, its spine cracked and its pages the colour of weak tea. I bought it for the sheer weight of it, for the promise of all those words held between two covers. It sat on my desk for years, a monolith of potential, a fortress of language I thought I could mine for better headlines, more precise prose, a more unique voice.
I used it, of course. I’d heave it open to find a synonym for ‘bright’ or to settle a bet about the spelling of ‘millennium’. But my real ritual, the one that became a quiet, private superstition, was to randomly open it and stab my finger at a word. I called it ‘finding a word for the day.’ It was a way to court serendipity, to invite a stranger into my mind. I found ‘susurrus’ (a whispering, murmuring sound) and ‘crepuscular’ (of or like twilight) and ‘apricity’ (the warmth of the sun in winter). Beautiful, neglected words. I’d jot them down in a margin, thrilled by the discovery, and then… nothing.
I never used them. Not in a blog post, not in a headline, not in a whispered conversation. They remained perfect, pristine, and utterly silent in my notebooks. They were like exquisite tools I was too afraid to smudge with use.
The revelation came the day I decided to read the very last entry. I wrestled the tome open to the final page. The paper was thin and fragile. And there it was, the last word in this particular volume of the English language: ‘Zyzzogeton.’
It’s a noun. It refers to a genus of large South American leafhoppers. I sat back in my chair and laughed, a sudden, unexpected burst of air. Of all the words, this was the final one. Not a profound philosophical term, not a beautiful descriptor of emotion, but a precise, specific name for a bug almost no one has ever seen.
And it struck me that this is the whole endeavour. We spend our writing lives collecting words like ‘zyzzogeton’—arcane, precise, beautiful—and we believe that deploying them will make our work weightier, more authoritative, more ‘us.’ But audience-building, clear editorial craft, isn’t about displaying the contents of your private lexicon. It’s about communication. It’s about choosing the right word, not the rarest.
The dictionary isn’t a quarry to be strip-mined for gems. It’s a map of the entire territory, from the well-trodden city centres to the forgotten paths where the leafhoppers dwell. My job isn’t to lead my readers down those overgrown paths just to show I know they’re there. My job is to take the common, sturdy words—the ‘walk’ and ‘see’ and ‘feel’—and assemble them into a path so clear they don’t notice the words at all. They only see the view.
I still open the dictionary at random. I still love the sound of ‘susurrus’ in my head. But I let them remain where I found them, beautiful ghosts in the margins. The real work happens with the words we all share.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: