From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language-'so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy'-and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from 'the irredeemably famous' Samuel Johnson to the 'short, pale,