The much-anticipated new picture book from the best-selling, award-winning creators of A Child of Books. Dictionary wishes she could tell a story like other books. So one day, she decides to bring her words to life. How exciting it is to finally have an adventure on her very own pages! But what will she do when her characters collide and everything gets all in a jumble, causing the most enormous tantrum to explode? This isn’t what she wanted at all! Luckily her friend Alphabet knows exactly what to do and sings a song that brings calm and order to Dictionary’s pages once again.

More than 4000 alphabetically-arranged words are defined within story sentences involving Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, and other super heros.

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

A young reader introduces a boy to the many imaginative worlds that books bring to life.