The Disappearing Dictionary

Lena Carter loved words. As a junior lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary, she spent her days surrounded by them—old words, new words, words that had travelled across oceans and centuries. But one Tuesday morning, something strange happened.

Lena arrived at her desk to find her favourite volume of the dictionary open to the page where “serendipity” should have been. The word was gone. Not crossed out, not smudged—simply vanished, as if it had never existed. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and checked again. The space between “serenade” and “serene” was empty.

“That’s odd,” she muttered. She reached for another volume. “Whimsical” had disappeared too. So had “mellifluous.” Lena’s heart began to race. She grabbed her phone and called her supervisor, Dr. Whitmore.

“Dr. Whitmore, words are missing from the dictionary,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

There was a pause. “Missing? Lena, are you sure you’re not overworked?”

“I’m sure. Look for yourself.”

Half an hour later, Dr. Whitmore stood in the reading room, staring at the gaps in the pages. “This is impossible,” he murmured. “Words don’t just vanish.”

Lena bit her lip. “Unless someone—or something—is erasing them.”

That night, Lena stayed late, determined to solve the mystery. She set up a camera near the dictionary shelves, hoping to catch the culprit in the act. As the clock struck midnight, she dozed off at her desk.

She woke to the sound of pages turning. Her eyes flew open. A faint, silvery light glowed from the shelves. Lena crept closer and gasped. A small, shadowy figure—no taller than a child—was flipping through the dictionary, its fingers tracing the words. Wherever it touched, the ink faded away.

“Stop!” Lena shouted.

The creature froze. It turned its large, luminous eyes toward her. “You can see me?” it whispered in a voice like rustling paper.

Lena nodded. “Why are you erasing the words?”

The creature sighed. “The world has forgotten us. No one uses these words anymore. If they vanish from the dictionary, they vanish from memory forever. We… we didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

Lena’s anger melted. She understood. Words were alive, in their own way. And like all living things, they needed care.

The next morning, Lena returned to the dictionary with a plan. She started a blog, “Word of the Day,” featuring the forgotten words. She read them aloud on the radio. Slowly, people began to notice. “Serendipity” and “whimsical” crept back into conversations. And one by one, the words reappeared in the dictionary.

As for the little creature? It never returned. But sometimes, when Lena worked late, she’d catch a glimpse of something shimmering between the shelves—a quiet thank you from the words themselves.