If the history of lesbianism has often been cast as one of invisibility and erasure,¹ then the history of lesbians using dictionaries could just as easily be described in terms of absence. In 1938, Virginia Woolf started writing a ‘Supplement to the Dictionary of the English Language’ and stopped after three entries. Her last definition was ‘A word for those who put living people into books’, but what that word should have been was left as a question mark.² When, in the 1970s, Judy Grahn began researching the etymologies of words for gay women and men, she ‘spent more than one evening in complete frustration sitting banging a dictionary against [her] knees screaming, “I know you’re in there!” after months of chasing the word bulldike’.³ Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig chose to redress the gaps in mainstream dictionaries by compiling their own lexicon, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1980, original French edition 1976), in which they imagine a forgotten lesbian past and a utopian lesbian future. However, as they note in their entry for dictionary itself, their work is ‘only a rough draft’, and its ‘arrangement could be called lacunary’.⁴ The most famous lacuna occurs at the entry for Sappho, which is a blank page.

Although absences like these may feel disheartening, I want to consider how they can also open up a space for creativity. Woolf’s question mark solicits an answer. When Grahn did not find a definition of bulldike, she wrote her own – ‘In slang, a strong, warriorlike Lesbian, assertive-looking Gay woman’ – and fancifully carried its origins back to the Iceni queen Boudica.⁵ The blank space Wittig and Zeig left under Sappho could be a testament to how little is known for certain about Sappho’s life, or it could be an invitation to the dictionary’s users to fill in what they imagine about the poet for themselves. And why not? After all, we routinely speak of ‘using’ a dictionary rather than simply ‘reading’ it. ‘Use’ is mutable and multifunctional. Using a dictionary might mean accepting what one finds in it, but it might also mean arguing with it, reinterpreting it, or even rewriting it to serve some alternative purpose.

In her own style, Anne Lister did all these things. Her interest in classical and modern languages made her a habitual user of dictionaries and grammars of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German and Russian, as well as English. When she was twelve, she asked her aunt to get her the best dictionary that her savings (five guineas) could buy.⁶ In her twenties, she compiled a short, private glossary of erotic and anatomical words she had gleaned from several reference works, starting with fuck and ending with tribas.⁷ When the library she built up at Shibden Hall was auctioned after her death in 1840, a partial catalogue of its contents included thirty-nine dictionaries, ranging from Johann Scapula’s Lexicon Graeco-Latinum to Pierre-Hubert Nysten’s Dictionnaire de médecine.⁸ It goes without saying that not all these titles (or terms) would have been expected to appear in a gentlewoman’s library (or in her vocabulary). Then again, Lister was never averse to what Sara Ahmed has called ‘queer uses’. Queer in this context refers not only to uses that are sexually subversive, but to any occasions when ‘things [are] used in ways other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended’. Importantly, Ahmed proposes that spaces as well as things can be turned to queer use, if they are occupied for functions unforeseen by the people who left them open.⁹

This chapter will trace the spaces and passages between Lister, language and dictionaries. Some of this ground has already been covered, of course. Scholars have addressed Lister’s ‘crypt hand’, her codewords and her classical philology.¹⁰ At the meta-critical level, there has been robust debate over the validity of applying to Lister labels such as queer and lesbian, with all the contemporary baggage that comes attached to them (see Gonda, this volume). Although I have already used both labels in proximity to Lister, this chapter will focus on the erotic words to which Lister did have access in the early nineteenth century, and the ways in which she found and refitted them to suit her personal needs. For modern readers, lexicography offers one window into Lister’s verbal innovations. It also gives us a view of how she manoeuvred around certain patriarchal language attitudes inherited from the eighteenth century, which derided novelties in women’s speech and writing as signs of ignorance rather than ingenuity.

In what follows, I will survey some of Lister’s unconventional uses of dictionaries, as well as her inventive usage of language to express ideas that went unrecognised by dictionaries in her time. I will close with a comment on her use by dictionaries in our own time, when her life is chronicled in the Dictionary of National Biography and her diaries are quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Throughout, it will be apparent that writing a lexicon is no more an impassive activity than using one. Samuel Johnson may have claimed in his landmark dictionary of 1755 that he did ‘not form, but register[ed] the language … [did] not teach men how they should think, but relate[d] how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts’,¹¹ yet even the largest reference work can only provide a selective view of a living language. That the words, meanings and illustrative quotations selected by standard dictionaries have tended to favour the thoughts of men was a problem that Lister had to overcome, and one that still hampers lexicographers’ treatment of her writing today.

Lister’s Lookups

Admittedly, Lister often did use dictionaries in ways that their writers had intended: as guides to general knowledge and self-improvement. As a child, she had asked her aunt to ensure that the dictionary she bought her would ‘not only instruct [her] in Spelling, but in the … fashionable way of pronounciation [sic]’.¹² Years later, her high-society aspirations still made her sensitive to anything in her speech that might mark her out as parochial. When she was told by Isabella Norcliffe that her pronunciation of iron as it was spelled was a ‘Yorkshirism’, Lister initially ‘resist[e]d’ but then ‘turn[in]g to Sheridan’s pronounc[in]g dict[ionary]’ was vexed to ‘find she [was] right’.¹³ Thomas Sheridan’s dictionary – which aimed at ‘fix[ing] a general standard’ of English pronunciation throughout Britain – did not actually proscribe the northern form of iron, but the only pronunciation it registered was the southern ‘i´-urn’.¹⁴ As Lister’s anxiety makes plain, exclusions such as this were (and are) socially meaningful. When a dictionary is intended to provide a model of ‘standard’ English, then whatever it omits is positioned as illegitimate – and delegitimising certain words can in turn stigmatise the people who use them.¹⁵ At the same time, words may be delegitimised in the first place because of the people who use them, or who are thought to use them.

This illegitimation is not always effected by omission. Johnson’s dictionary, for example, included several headwords that he nonetheless disparaged as ‘women’s cant’, though the quotations with which he illustrated them were all drawn from male authors. Flirtation (‘A cant word among women’) and horrid (sense 2, ‘in womens cant’ [sic]) were supported by extracts from Alexander Pope, frightfully (sense 2, ‘A woman’s word’) by one from Jonathan Swift, and so on.¹⁶ Swift’s own unflattering remark on women’s speech is quoted in the dictionary under fluency (sense 2): ‘The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a scarcity of words; for whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.’ In a similar vein, the Earl of Chesterfield – Johnson’s ineffectual patron – wrote sardonically just before the dictionary’s publication that he hoped Johnson would not ‘proscribe any of those happy redundancies and luxuriancies of expression’ with which the language had been ‘enriched’ by his ‘fair countrywomen, whose natural turn [was] more to the copiousness, than to the correctness of diction’.¹⁷

Lister was thus linguistically marginalised by her gender as well as her provincialism. Yet, while she was willing to defer to a southern standard of pronunciation, her navigation of sexist language norms was more complex. Ironically, though the above male writers dismissed female innovations as misuses, their own writing would be exploited by the innovative Lister, who turned their words to her own ends. She found Swift’s fluency quotation in Johnson and copied it into her diary – but only to apply it to a man, the ‘slow, & tedious, & tiresome’ Dr Scudamore.¹⁸ Given her erudition, Lister doubtless saw herself as the exception to Swift’s rule. More subversively, she took Dr Johnson’s famed rejection of Chesterfield’s belated show of interest in his dictionary – ‘The notice … had it been early, had been kind’ – and reworked it into a defence of her decision to visit, at last, the home of the attractive but unpedigreed Miss Elizabeth Browne. ‘S[ai]d ye D[octo]r’, she reminded herself, ‘H[a]d it been earl[ie]r it h[a]d been kind[e]r…’¹⁹

As other scholars have observed, Lister’s social conservatism was engaged in an intricate dance with her gender nonconformity.²⁰ This sometimes led her to object to improprieties in other women that she privately allowed in herself. While she criticised Isabella for being ‘too fond of gross language’,²¹ Lister made a point of looking up obscene words in the Universal Etymological English Dictionary of Nathan Bailey. She gathered her findings into an encrypted glossary in one of her commonplace books, which included:

• Fuck … fœminam subagitare [to handle a woman sexually]

• Cunt … pudendum muliebre [the genitals of a woman]

• Prick … a mans yard²²

In this case, Lister’s was surely not a use of the dictionary that its compiler had anticipated. Bailey’s screening of the first two definitions behind Latin – a language known to few Englishmen and fewer Englishwomen – exemplifies how elite male stereotypes about women’s discourse existed alongside attempts to control the discourses to which women did have access. Yet, while classical tongues were obstacles to many readers, to Lister they were stepping-stones to knowledge she could obtain in few other places. Her exceptional learning and relative wealth allowed her not only to interpret definitions but to consult dictionaries (as well as other books) that were not addressed to her.

When she was twenty-eight, she learnt from Scapula’s Greek–Latin lexicon that τριβάδες (tribades) were ‘dicuntur fœminæ, perditæ libidinis ac nefariæ lasciviæ: quæ ὀλίσβῳ sese τρίβουσιν mutuo’ (said to be women of depraved lustfulness and vile lasciviousness who mutually rub themselves with an olisbos [i.e. a dildo]).²³ Lister may have been prompted to look up the word after reading a ‘ver[y] interest[in]g’ article on Sappho in the Historical and Critical Dictionary of Pierre Bayle: written for an audience of male scholars, the dictionary candidly described Sappho as ‘a Famous Tribas’ whose poetic fragments included ‘an Ode to one of her Mistresses’.²⁴ Around the same time, Lister was intrigued by allusions she found in Suetonius’s De Vita Caesarum and Martial’s epigrams to the lost erotic works of another female poet, Elephantis.²⁵ Bayle’s dictionary had no entry for Elephantis, but Lister walked down to Halifax’s subscription library to consult the Bibliotheca Classica of John Lemprière. Unfortunately, all she learnt from Lemprière’s dictionary was that Elephantis was ‘a poetess who wrote lascivious verses’.²⁶

Such was the unpredictability of tracing the sexual bi(bli)ographies of ancient women through books written by and for men.²⁷ Still, Lister must have drawn her own conclusions about what Martial had meant when he told of the ‘Veneris novae figurae’ (novel erotic postures) once unfolded by Elephantis.²⁸ Her imagination would certainly be fired up a few months later, when she came across the word crisantis in Juvenal’s satires and looked it up in Adam Littleton’s Latin Dictionary. There, the translation of the lemma crisso as ‘to wag the tail (de muliere dic. in actu copulationis)’ (said of a woman in the act of copulation) so excited Lister that she gave herself an orgasm.²⁹ Though crisso was conventionally applied to cross-sex intercourse, the dictionary entry did not actually make the presence of a man explicit – and this gap was enough for Lister to use as a way in.

Studying anatomy would prove equally stimulating. Among the French medical books Lister bought in Paris in 1830 was Nysten’s Dictionnaire de médecine; while perusing its definition of ‘clitoris &c. &c’., she decided to ‘tr[y] if [she] had much of one’ and ended up masturbating in her seat.³⁰ Nysten’s description of the clitoris as possessing a structure ‘analogue à celle du pénis’ (analogous to that of the penis) would have appealed to Lister, given her daydreams about having a phallus, but perhaps she was more enticed by the adjacent entry for clitorisme, ‘l’abus que les femmes font quelquefois de leur sexe lorsqu’elles ont un clitoris volumineux’ (the abuse that women sometimes make of their sex when they have an enlarged clitoris; see Clark, this volume).³¹ Even if Lister found her body to be of ordinary proportions, her extraordinary use of the dictionary shows that intellectual self-improvement can lie on a continuum with self-discovery, and even with ‘self pollution’ – the definition she gave to masturbation in her personal glossary.³² Although she often regretted the physical consequences of her imagination, she betrayed no shame in the imagination itself, or in its ability to find channels for her desire through hostile scholarly terrain.

Novel Denominations

In conversation with other women, Lister’s learning became a means both of flirting and of showing off, and these performances were sometimes accompanied by language play. To Anne ‘Nantz’ Belcombe she related ‘the anecdote of the ancients using lead plates to prevent pain in their knees the expression which I use & which she understands to mean desire’. Having laid this groundwork, Lister could later seductively tell Nantz about the ‘pain [she felt] in [her own] knees’.³³ To Nantz’s sister, Mariana Lawton, Lister revealed that the emperor Tiberius was said to have owned a ‘picture by Parrhasius of Meleager & Atalanta sucking his queer’.³⁴ Queer (or quere) is well known to researchers as Lister’s euphemism for the vulva, though she applied it to the penis too. Of course, here and elsewhere in the diaries, it is not clear whether Lister actually used queer in speech or if she just inserted it into her write-up afterwards. A similar question hangs over some of the terms Lister attributes to her conversational partners. When Lister reports that Isabella ‘said she was well of her cousin’ – cousin being Lister’s customary word for menstruation – was it Isabella’s word too or has she been paraphrased on the page?³⁵ Cousin, at least, was probably not limited to Lister – or indeed to her social network – but the status of certain other ‘Listerisms’ is harder to appraise.³⁶ Although evidence of use beyond Lister’s diary can sometimes be gleaned from the letters and journals of her friends and lovers, at present it is difficult to be sure which terms were idiolectal (restricted to Lister), duolectal (shared between Lister and one partner) or sociolectal (common to multiple members of Lister’s circle); in the latter cases, Lister might not have been the originator of every term.

Whatever their range of circulation, Lister did not use her codewords for want of a knowledge of their more common – or more esoteric – synonyms. Her private glossary shows that she knew the vulva could be called a ‘cunt’ or ‘pudendum’ and the penis a ‘prick … yard peni[s] veratrum [or] verenda’ as well as a queer, and that menstruation could be called ‘catamen[i]a the menses monthly courses or flowers’ as well as cousin.³⁷ The Earl of Chesterfield may have scoffed at women who took existing words and gave them new meanings – as he said, changing them ‘like a guinea into shillings for pocket money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day’³⁸ – but Lister’s coinages served vital personal and relational functions.

First, creating a private vocabulary and orthography was a way of fostering intimacy with other women and of protecting that intimacy from suspicious eavesdroppers and snooping readers. While Lister lived with Maria Barlow, for instance, the two used the phrase going to Italy to signal Lister’s ‘acknowledg[ing Mrs Barlow] as [her] own & giv[ing] her [her] promise for life’.³⁹ Years before, Lister had devised her crypt hand at least partly so that she and her first love, Eliza Raine, could record the details of their relationship in secret; later, the code allowed Lister and Mariana to shield their correspondence from the latter’s jealous husband.⁴⁰ Lister was understandably annoyed when Isabella divulged to a group of acquaintances that she ‘[kept] a journ[al], & [set] d[o]wn ev[ery]one’s conversat[io]n in [her] peculiar hand-writ[in]g’. Nonetheless, it is hard not to detect a note of pride in Lister’s retort that the code was ‘alm[o]st imposs[ible]’ to decipher.⁴¹

Crypt hand began as a simple Greek letter cipher (a = α, b = β, etc.) but grew to incorporate Latin letters, Arabic numerals and mathematical signs as well. Inventing this labyrinth of glyphs was not just a defensive strategy but an intellectual game – one that allowed Lister to play with the relations between symbols and entire words or names. By 1818, she was placing the mark + or × in the margins of diary entries on days when she masturbated. Cross in turn became her name for the mark and, metonymically, for the act it signified.

• September 1818: thinking of Miss B[elcombe] & only just escaped +⁴²

• December 1819: observe the cross at the head of today[’s entry] oh I wish I could get off this vile habit⁴³

• August 1820: got to Martial & read him till near five when it ended in a cross astride of the bed post⁴⁴

As early as 1817, Lister began using another symbol to mark days on which she had sex with a woman, or what she called kisses (the word is returned to below). This symbol, , resembled a ligature of the Greek letters ος (i.e. os) – perhaps an abbreviation of Latin osculum ‘kiss’.⁴⁵ (In the first of the following quotations, Π stands for Mariana.)

• January 1817: Π gave me two very good kisses last night⁴⁶

• November 1820: I have had nothing to do with Tib [i.e. Isabella] when there is not this mark made ⁴⁷

Beyond intimacy, secrecy and creativity, the resignification of words afforded Lister’s desires and relationships a legitimacy that the standard language would have denied them. At times, this was as simple as laying claim to the word love, as Lister did when she tried to persuade Mary Vallance of the ardour of her feelings during their brief affair at Langton Hall in 1820: ‘I made her understand my use of the word love & still she said she did not wish me not to love her.’⁴⁸ Even one of Lister’s now most familiar declarations – ‘I love & only love the fairer sex … my heart revolts from any other love than theirs’ – becomes radical again when placed beside the limited definitions of love, noun and verb, offered by contemporary lexicography.⁴⁹ For Johnson, the primary meanings of love and to love were ‘The passion between the sexes’ and ‘To regard with passionate affection, as that of one sex to the other’. Usages like Lister’s, had his dictionary acknowledged them at all, would probably have been degraded to sense 7 of the noun, ‘Lewdness’.⁵⁰

Nor would Lister’s more serious romantic unions be intelligible under Johnson’s definition of marriage, ‘The act of uniting a man and woman for life’.⁵¹ Chris Roulston has written in detail about Lister’s and her partners’ reappropriation of marital discourse.⁵² Some of their marriage talk was simply optative – with Mrs Barlow: ‘said again & again I wished I could marry her’ – or similative – with Ann Walker: ‘it is to be as a marriage between us’ – but the lovers also referred to each other unequivocally in (cross-sex) spousal terms.⁵³ Eliza Raine called Lister her ‘husband’, as did Mariana, who further promised to be Lister’s ‘faithful wife’.⁵⁴ Privately, Lister referred to Mariana and Mrs Barlow as her ‘wife & mistress’ respectively.⁵⁵ In these partnerships, the language of marriage carried emotional weight even if it had no legal recognition. At the same time, Roulston points out that the more outwardly legible a same-sex union became as a marriage, the more it risked attracting unfriendly notice.⁵⁶ The desire for validation did not trump the need for discretion.

Still, the subtle and the sentimental were not always opposed. Lister managed to combine the two in her preferred word for sex between women (or an orgasm resulting from it), kiss. This was a well-established literary euphemism for penovaginal sex, but Lister’s usage suggests a further play on the standard meaning of the word – as Johnson had put it, a ‘Salute given by joining lips’.⁵⁷ Lister resignified both the verb and the noun.

• November 1816: [Nantz] said I wanted to make a fool of her & if she had more resolution she would not kiss me again⁵⁸

• October 1820: [Isabella] wanted a kiss … however grubbling seemed to satisfy her⁵⁹

• November 1834: a tolerable kiss [with Ann Walker] last night⁶⁰

Kiss was a word that Lister appears to have shared with at least one of her lovers: the November 1834 quotation has a corresponding entry in Ann Walker’s own journal, which concludes, ‘went to bed – K –’.⁶¹ The October 1820 quotation is also perhaps Lister’s earliest recorded use of grubbling to denote fingering a woman. This may have been another literary borrowing. In general use, grubble simply meant ‘to grope’ without a sexual connotation. Johnson defined it as ‘To feel in the dark’, supported by one quotation from John Dryden’s Don Sebastian, ‘Now let me rowl and grubble thee’, in reference to drawing lots.⁶² But Dryden had given the word a sexual spin elsewhere, in his translation of one of the elegies from the Amores of Ovid. The elegy depicts a man who hopes to meet his mistress at a crowded feast that is also attended by her husband: ‘There I will be, and there we cannot miss, / Perhaps to grubble, or at least to kiss.’⁶³ Dannielle Orr proposes that Lister may have derived her use of grubble from this passage.⁶⁴ While direct evidence is wanting, Lister did own a copy of Dryden’s Miscellanies, and by January 1820 she had acquired an English translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, which often came bound with the Amores.⁶⁵ If she came across Dryden’s version of the elegy, then she could well have sympathised with its lament for forbidden love.

Crucially, although Lister drew from the language of cross-sex intimacy, she rearranged what she took into a personal taxonomy of sexual ethics. While a medical lexicographer such as Nysten might condemn all kinds of masturbation as ‘vice honteux’ (shameful vice),⁶⁶ for Lister it was imperative to maintain a distinction between manually gratifying oneself (crosses) and others (grubbling). Whereas the former was a sin that had ‘no mutual affection to excuse it’, the latter was a valid expression of ‘natural & undeviating feeling’.⁶⁷ This naturalness did not, however, extend to the use of a dildo between women. As Lister declared to Mrs Barlow, that was ‘artifice’: ‘it was very different from mine [and] would be no pleasure to me … I know she understands all about the use of a olisbos [sic]’.⁶⁸ Curiously, while Lister was aware of Sapphic as a general label for sexuality between women, she seems to have used the phrases ‘Saφic regard’ and ‘Sapphic love’ to refer to sex with a dildo in particular.⁶⁹ How she formed this association is unclear, but it may have been influenced by what she had read about Sappho’s status as a tribas, and the tribades’ preference for olisboi, in Bayle’s and Scapula’s dictionaries. At any rate, these acts of stimulation – with hands or with toys, of the self or of another – were ethically discrete, and so they needed to be lexically separate. I have referred to Lister’s novel linguistic uses as forms of ‘play’, but it should be clear that this was play with a serious intent. Lister was not just changing guineas into shillings: she was casting her own currency of desire.

A Legacy in Words

In the present day, dictionary users can find information on Lister’s erotic writings more easily than she could track down those of Sappho or Elephantis. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in addition to discussing her studies, politics and travels, is explicit about ‘her first lesbian experiences’ with Eliza Raine, her love affair with Mariana Lawton and her domestic partnership with Ann Walker.⁷⁰ This entry, first published in the revised DNB in 2004, is one instance of the revisers’ attempts to combat the androcentrism of the dictionary’s first edition (1885–1900) and its supplements, in which entries about women made up 5 per cent of the total. In the 2004 edition, that number rose to 10 per cent.⁷¹

Gendered exclusions have likewise marked the pages of another historical reference work, the Oxford English Dictionary. As had been the case in Johnson’s dictionary more than a century before, the quotation banks of the OED’s first edition (1884–1928) were dominated by the writings of male authors from the traditional literary canon.⁷² Its compilers were also more reticent in print than Lister had been in her private glossary: they included an entry for cock but balked at cunt. In 1933, the sexual sense of lesbian was left out of the OED’s first Supplement because the editor in charge of L objected to it. Lesbian and cunt at last appeared in the more permissive second Supplement (1972–86), along with fuck, after its chief editor consulted several scholars about the propriety of admitting words such as these.⁷³ Notably, one Oxford professor protested that the draft definition of fuck should be altered to specify that in its transitive sense ‘the word is used only of males’. ‘You may not think this worth pointing out,’ he warned, ‘but I incline to think it is; otherwise lady novelists not themselves brought up on the word, and looking for something new, might misapply it!’⁷⁴ Male anxieties about women’s linguistic and erotic agency clearly did not evaporate after the nineteenth century.

There was little change in the OED’s second edition (1989), which was mostly an amalgam of the first edition and its supplements into one alphabetical sequence. However, since the OED was put online in 2000 – at which point work began on fully revising the dictionary for its third edition (OED3) – its editorial team have affirmed their commitment to improving the coverage of ‘women’s writing and non-literary texts’, including diaries.⁷⁵ Lister’s journals have so far played a very small part in this. As of December 2021, Lister is quoted eight times in the online OED, all in entries that have been updated or created for the third edition: see Table 1. Three of the quotations, marked by asterisks, provide the earliest evidence that the OED has been able to find for the senses they illustrate. None of the quotations is for a nonce-use (that is, a word or sense for which Lister is the only author cited). All but one of the extracts were sourced from Helena Whitbread’s second edited volume of Lister’s diaries, No Priest but Love. The last quotation, for potheration, was copied from the now-defunct website www.herstoryuntold.org.uk.

The small number of quotations from Priest, not to mention the inconsistent citing of Whitbread as its editor, suggests that the book was consulted ad hoc for particular words by different contributors, rather than being systematically combed through by one reader. Overall, the words for which Lister is cited – culinary, social, domestic – belong to the same semantic fields that Charlotte Brewer has identified as predominant in the OED’s treatment (on a larger scale) of one of Lister’s near-contemporaries, Jane Austen.⁷⁶ Brewer wonders how much the OED’s favouring of quotations for ‘ordinary’ words from Austen reflects the general diction of her novels, and how much it is inflected by the ‘assumption, that it [is] appropriate to source household, family and domestic terms’ – rather than, say, ‘moral vocabulary’ – ‘from texts written by women’.⁷⁷ Lister was writing a diary, not a novel, and her prose is understandably rich in the language of domesticity and sociability. If Priest had been read methodically for the OED, it could have provided other usages from this sphere that antedate the earliest evidence at present in the dictionary. For example, OED3 traces passé in the sense of ‘No longer fashionable; out of date; superseded’ back to 1844; Lister had employed this sense – ‘I loved her once, but this last was passé’ – in 1824.⁷⁸ Also overlooked is Lister’s use of napkin to mean a menstrual cloth – ‘she considers me too much as a woman … I have aired napkins before her’ (1825) – a sense that OED3 dates only to 1873.⁷⁹

But Lister’s vocabulary encompassed more than ordinary words. The non-standard words used by her or her circle, such as cousin for menstruation and queer for genitals, have not been registered in OED3’s entries for those words. The entries for cross, grubble and kiss have yet to be updated for the third edition, and it remains to be seen whether Lister’s resignifications of them will fare any better. Of course, there are limits to the number of nonce-uses that a dictionary can include, no matter its size. Yet, even if OED3 did not attempt to tease out the precise shades of meaning in, for instance, Lister’s usage of Sapphic, that usage is surely still worth quoting under the dictionary’s current definition of Sapphic (adj. sense 2), ‘Of, relating to, engaging in, or characterized by sexual activity between women or female same-sex desire; = lesbian adj. 2’. This definition was revised in 2018. It is followed by seven quotations taken from texts written between 1761 and 2006 – none of which is attributed to a woman.⁸⁰

Male writers likewise supply all eight of the quotations (from 1602 to 2004) under OED3’s definition of husband (n. sense 2b), updated in 2016: ‘In other (esp. same-sex) relationships in which the two partners are regarded as occupying roles analogous to those in a traditional mixed-sex marriage: the person assuming the role regarded as more stereotypically masculine, i.e. as being equivalent to that of the husband’.⁸¹ All but one of the quotations describe male same-sex relationships. The exception, from the American Journal of Sociology (1931) – ‘These “honies” refer to each other as “my man” and “my woman”, “my wife” and “my husband”’ – does not make the gender of its subjects clear, and users must unearth the original article to learn that it concerns the ‘problem of homosexuality’ at an institution for ‘delinquent girls’.⁸² Even here, the voices of women are mediated by an unsympathetic male ventriloquist. How strikingly different is Mariana’s use of wife in her heartfelt pledge to Lister in Priest: ‘so long as life shall last, I will be your lover, friend & your faithful wife’.⁸³

A similar note of dissent could be added to OED3’s entry for olisbos, ‘A dildo’, revised in 2004. Its earliest quotation comes from an 1887 translation of the Manual of Classical Erotology by Friedrich Karl Forberg, commenting on the tribadic figure of Bassa in Martial’s epigrams: ‘There are expounders..who..have imagined that Bassa misused women by introducing into their vagina a leathern contrivance, an olisbos, a godemiche’ (original ellipses). Lister was familiar with this view. As noted earlier, she had read about women rubbing each other with olisboi in the entry for τριβάδες in Scapula’s Greek–Latin lexicon. However, perhaps because of her own dislike of dildos, she was sceptical of their universality among classical tribades. Her own interpretation of Bassa was that ‘it does not appear that she made use of olisbos a leather penis as Scapula says some of them did’ – a remark that not only argues against that in Classical Erotology but antedates its use of olisbos to 1820.⁸⁴ Of course, this comment appears in one of Lister’s as-yet undigitised papers, and given the limited interest OED contributors have so far shown in her published diaries, it seems doubtful they will read the manuscripts.

The gender bias in these entries is not exceptional.⁸⁵ As a historical dictionary, the OED is bound to document centuries of English in which works by men have been produced more frequently, distributed more widely and valued more highly than those by women. Nonetheless, at any point in time, there is never just one side to the linguistic guinea. As Ahmed reminds us, ‘A history of use is also a history of that which is not deemed useful enough to be preserved or retained.’⁸⁶ The history of a word is a history not only of what it has been used to mean but whom it has been used by. When a dictionary fails to preserve the usage of the marginalised, it reinforces that marginalisation.

There will always be gaps in the record, it is true. Woolf couldn’t think of a term for ‘those who put living people into books’; nor is there a term for those who put living languages into books. Lexicographers cannot capture everything a word has ever meant. Then again, they also cannot constrain everything a word may yet mean. Silence in the lexicon, rather than being an end-point, might only be the start of a conversation. So it was for Lister and Ann Walker one morning in 1834, when the two were travelling in France. As Walker’s journal records, ‘d[ea]r[es]t slept till 8 – & I then went to her – at 9¹⁵ we got up, explained to me all [the] words I had written down that I c[oul]d not find in [the] Diction[ar]y’.⁸⁷ A century and a half before Wittig and Zeig, Lister and Walker showed that moving beyond the dictionary can be an act of intimacy between women. In her own writings, Lister’s linguistic innovations may not have been publicly political in the manner of Lesbian Peoples, but they were equally a means of laying claim to a language whose standard histories were devoid of words that affirmed her emotions and relationships.⁸⁸ Happily, as she discovered, empty spaces provided some of the most fertile ground for self-articulation.