One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

Reading the Oxford English Dictionary

Ammon Shea has been reading dictionaries since he was ten years old. Along the way he has supported this habit by being a street muscian in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego and a furniture mover in New York City. He lives in New York with his girlfriend (a former lexicographer) and a large number of old dictionaries. Visit his website at www.ammonshea.com.

'If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on. I have read the OED so you don't have to...' 
 
Weighing in at 137 pounds, the Oxford English Dictionary is the word lover's Everest and the world's most exhaustive and exhausting dictionary - for instance, there are over 60,000 words on the various meanings of set and un- goes on for 451 pages. 
 
Like a lexicographical Edmund Hillary, Ammon Shea set out to boldly read, where no reader has gone before - from cover to cover.Reading the OED gives a very funny account of his coffee-fuelled twelve months lost inside its 20 volumes. 
 
Divided into 26 chapters, one per letter of the alphabet, this book is part personal narrative (exploring everything from love to glasses to the superiority of books over computers) and part a collection of Shea's favourite discoveries. These span from the oddly useful (parabore - a defence against bores) to the downright bizarre (natiform - shaped like buttocks) and takes in Nashe's eight different kinds of drunkenness and all kinds of other strangely memorable information along the way. 
 
Filled with curiosities, delights and surprises, Reading the OED is a feast for language obsessives, from a man who loves words (perhaps a little too much).

Ammon Shea

Delightful . . . I doubt if a dictionary has ever had such love and attention lavished on it

Inspiring . . . Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own

Drily humorous . . . Shea' s Infectious spirit shines through

One Man's Journey Into All The Words He'll Ever Need

Ammon Shea was ten when he first discovered the joy of reading a dictionary rather than using it to look a word up. Little did he imagine that one day he would spend over $1,000 and sacrifice an entire bookcase and a whole year to the twenty volumes that make up the king of all reference books: The Oxford English Dictionary. 
 
It was a year that changed his life, not least when he fell in love with a lexicographer. In this hilarious, personal and fascinating book, with a chapter for each letter of the alphabet, Shea introduces us to hundreds of words he discovered that deserve to see the light of day again, and explains why. Want to know the word for the area on your back that you can't reach to scratch (acnestis)? Or the term for the smell of earth just after a rainstorm (petrichor)? Or perhaps you're just looking for the word to describe that feeling of saying enough (satisdiction). This book is all you need.

Ammon Shea

Praise for Satisdiction

Delightful . . . I doubt if a dictionary has ever had such love and attention lavished on it

Inspiring . . . Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own

Drily humorous . . . Shea' s Infectious spirit shines through

Delightful . . . I doubt if a dictionary has ever had such love and attention lavished on it

Inspiring . . . Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own

Drily humorous . . . Shea' s Infectious spirit shines through

Delightful . . . I doubt if a dictionary has ever had such love and attention lavished on it

Inspiring . . . Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own

Drily humorous . . . Shea' s Infectious spirit shines through

Books by Ammon Shea

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