The Curious Dictionary
Author: Nick Earls
Illustrator: Terry Whidborne
Book 1 in the Word Hunters series
Pages: 240
Published: 2012
Age: 9+
From award-winning author Nick Earls and illustrator Terry Whidborne comes a mysterious, action-packed series for the word nerd in us all.
Lexi and Al Hunter are twins with almost nothing in common – except their parents and their birthday! At school Lexi hangs with her friends in the cool crowd, while Al hides in the library reading about history, battles and faraway places.
When the twins stumble upon an old dictionary their world as they know it changes. They are blasted into history to hunt down the words that threaten to vanish from our past and our present. Their lives and the future of the world are at stake. Can they find a way back home? Or will they be trapped in the past forever? Now more than ever, they need to depend on each other if they want to survive.
50 Books You Can't Put Down (formerly 'Get Reading!') Reading list (2012)
About the Word Hunters Series
Books in series order
- 1.The Curious Dictionary(2012)
- 2.The Lost Hunters(2013)
- 3.War of the Word Hunters(2013)
Reading age: 9+ years
This series should be read in order.
Words come and go from languages, but how do we know which words? And what if we lost some of the words we use the most? What if they just disappeared, and it was as if they'd never existed?
That's where word hunters come in. Every so often a word is at risk, and it's up to word hunters to track down every step of its past to keep it alive in the present. From the Battle of Hastings, to ancient cities they’ve never heard of, to encounters with great inventors, word hunters might find themselves anywhere any time dealing with anything.
For 1500 years, led by an ancient dictionary created by the mysterious Caractacus, they’ve protected English from falling apart, one word hunter at a time. But now there are two – Lexi and Al Hunter, twelve-year-old twins from Fig Tree Pocket. They find the book in their school library during renovations, or perhaps it finds them. From that moment, their life can't be the same again. Suddenly it's 1877, then 1835, then 1100, then 925 as they chase down the possible history of the word 'hello' so that we can all keep saying it now.
But that's only one word and the dictionary, as we all know, is full of them. And the past isn't always a friendly place to drop in...