This would be the first, I thought. It was unique because it hadn’t come from a book. But against all the rest, there was nothing to distinguish it. I pulled the ribbon from my hair and tied it around the slip. It looked forlorn on its own, but I could imagine others.

Da once told me that it was Dr. Murray’s idea to make the slips the size they were. At first he sent prepared slips to volunteers, but after a while it was enough to simply instruct people to provide their words and sentences on pieces of paper six by four inches. Blank paper was not always available to some of the volunteers, and when I was small, Da would search for me under the sorting table to show me the slips cut from newspaper, old shopping lists, used butcher’s paper (a brown stain of blood blooming across the words) and even pages torn from books. I found these last shocking and suggested Dr. Murray dismiss volunteers who ruined books. Da laughed. The worst offender, he said, was Frederick Furnivall. Dr. Murray might think of dismissing him occasionally, but Frederick Furnivall was secretary of the Philological Society. The Dictionary was his idea.

Dr. Murray’s slips were ingenious, Da said. Simple and efficient, their value increasing as the Scriptorium filled with words and storage became more and more limited. Dr. Murray designed them to fit the pigeon-holes exactly. Not an inch of space had been wasted.

Each slip had its own personality, and while it was being sorted there was a chance the word it contained would be understood. At the very least, it would be picked up and read. Some slips were passed from hand to hand, others were the subject of long debate and sometimes a row. For a while, every word was as important as the one before it and the one after it, no matter what its slip had been cut from. If it was complete, it would be stored in a pigeon-hole, pinned or tied with other slips, their conformity highlighted by the oversized and colourful few that were cut to their own design.

I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn’t quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.