The Telegraph featured a man who reads the dictionary for fun, which I will admit I have done in the past; just not all 20 volumes of the OED… You think you would have to keep a dictionary beside you while you read his book just to keep up?

Ammon Shea must be a masochist. He set himself the task of reading all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary in a single year – that’s the equivalent of reading a novel every day. The resulting book, Reading The OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, has just been published in America.

The first question, surely, has to be why do it? Well, Mr Shea loves words and owns around 1,000 dictionaries. However, the experience of having to absorb 59 million words, from A to Zyxt, made him catatonic – especially during the 400 pages devoted to words beginning with ‘un’ – and euphoric: the OED, he concludes, is nothing less than ‘a catalog of the foibles of the human condition’.

Of course, the joy of his o(e)dyssey is discovering words that you might never otherwise have come across: acnestis, for example, which is the part of an animal’s back that it cannot reach to scratch; deipnophobia, the fear of dinner parties; and kankedort, an awkward situation.

The most apt word might well be ploiter: to work to little purpose.