The Oxford English Dictionary is not everyone's idea of a page turner.
But a man has just completed the mammoth, if not bizarre, task of reading the 22,000-page tome cover to cover.
Ammon Shea, 37, who has been dissecting dictionaries since the age of 10, spent a year absorbing 59 million words, from A to Zyxt - the equivalent of reading a John Grisham novel every day.
Cooped up in the basement of his local library, the removal man from New York would devote up to 10 hours a day painstakingly making his way through all 20 volumes of the OED - helped by cup after cup of very strong coffee.
Every time he came across an interesting word, he jotted it down, fearful that he would not remember its meaning.
Among his favourite discoveries were obmutescence (willfully quiet), hypergelast (a person who won't stop laughing), natiform (shaped like buttocks) and deipnosophist (a person who is learned in the art of dining.)
He admitted there were times when he almost gave up, frustrated at not being familiar with any of the words on the page.
In his new book, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, he recalls a low point when he started learning words beginning with the letter N.
"Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language, or understand it with any degree of real comprehension," he said.
"It is as if I am visiting a foreign country, armed with one of those silly little tourist phrase book...I may know enough to order a cup of coffee or inquire where the bathroom is."
By the time he reached the 400 pages devoted to words beginning with "un", he said he was "near catatonic, bored out of my mind, and so listless I can't remember why I wanted to read any of this in the first place.
"At this point, telling myself, 'You only have 351 pages of un-words to go', does not seem helpful. I don't quite feel as though I have lost my mind, but it often seems as though it is on vacation somewhere else, just east of sanity."
Why anyone would choose to put themselves through such a task is a question Mr Shea is often asked.
As a self-confessed lover of words who owns a thousand dictionaries, he said that reading the entire OED was a challenge he set himself many years ago.
"The OED, more so than any other dictionary, encompasses the entire history of all English's glories and foibles, the grand concepts and whimsical conceits that make our language what it is today," he said.
"It's a great read. It is much more engrossing, enjoyable and moving to read than you would typically think a non-narrative body of text could ever possibly be."
Source: Daily Telegraph
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