She thought about it. “It’s not just tired from lack of sleep; it’s tired from work—physical work. I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be warm and fed when they wake, and I don’t go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackered half the time, like a worn-out horse. No good for nothing.”

I took the slip from my pocket and looked at the word. Listless wasn’t quite like knackered. It was lazier. I looked at Lizzie and understood why she would never have cause to use it.

“Do you have a pencil, Mrs. B?”

Mrs. Ballard hesitated. “I don’t much like the look of that slip of paper in your hand, Esme.”

I showed it to her. “It’s incomplete, see? It’s scrap. I’m going to reuse it.”

She nodded. “Lizzie, love, there’s a pencil just inside the pantry, near my shopping list. Would you get it for Esme?”

I put a line through listless and turned the slip over. It was blank, but I wavered. I’d never written a slip before. I’d been taking words for years—reading them, remembering them, rescuing them. I turned to them for explanation. But when the Dictionary words let me down, I’d never imagined I could add to them.

As Lizzie and Mrs. Ballard watched on, I wrote:

KNACKERED

“I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be warm and fed when they wake, and I don’t go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackered half the time, like a worn-out horse. No good for nothing.”

Lizzie Lester, 1902

“Don’t reckon Dr. Murray will think that a proper quotation,” said Mrs. Ballard. “But it’s good to see it written down. Lizzie’s not wrong. It wears you out, being on your feet all day.”

“What did you write?” Lizzie asked.

I read it to her and she reached for her crucifix. I wondered if I’d upset her.

“Nothing I ever said has been written down,” she finally said. Then she got up and cleared the table.

I looked at my slip. It would have been at home in one of the pigeon-holes, I thought, and I wondered what Lizzie would think of her name and her words nestled against the likes of Wordsworth and Swift. I decided to create a top-slip and pin it to Lizzie’s word; then I remembered that all the K words were already published.

I left Lizzie and Mrs. Ballard to their lunch and took the stairs two at a time. The trunk under Lizzie’s bed was more than half-full. I placed knackered on top of the pile.