So much drama and mayhem surrounds what we casually display on our tables/book shelf - which isn't all that common anymore, unfortunately. Simon Winchester starts at the very beginning - how writers and officials dealt with the language and knew how to use the words efficiently. Shakespeare did it. Austen did it. And they wrote spectacularly. 
 Its a book about words and how they all ended up in one giant book or a bunch of volumes. It is every bit interesting as the tag line for this book. Winchester's dramatization of this piece of history elevates the appreciation to what we have come to know today as Oxford English Dictionary.