Man left with onomatomania after reading Oxford dictionary from A to Z

By any sane reckoning Ammon Shea is a vocabularian – one who pays too much attention to words.

In a single, gruelling year, the sometime furniture removal man, busker and gondolier from New York has read the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover.

He has returned from his adventure in the far reaches of the English language with a rich harvest of obscure and forgotten words to share: indispensable gems such as “deipnophobia” (fear of dinner parties) or “apricity” (the warmth of the sun in winter). In return he suffered back pain, problems with his sight and constant headaches.



As his book, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary, makes clear, Mr Shea’s feat failed to make him a better person, improve his conversation or make him appear more intelligent. Rather it turned him into a mafflard (a stuttering or blundering fool), bedevilled by onomatomania (vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word).

“It had a horrible effect on my ability to interact with people,” said Mr Shea, whose book is published in Britain on October 16. “There was such a profusion of words in my head I almost lost the ability to speak and ended up stuttering or groping for words like some kind of blithering idiot. Most of the time it wasn’t that I forgot the right bon mot; it was that I would forget the word for bread or shoes.” The statistics of Mr Shea’s eccentric achievement are formidable: 59 million words spread over 21,370 large pages of small print, the equivalent of reading the entire King James Bible every day for two and a half months or a new John Grisham novel every day for more than a year.

Mr Shea’s experience was, however, mostly pleasurable. “It was incredibly engaging and engrossing. Sometimes I would wake up and start reading at three in the morning because I was so excited. A dictionary has all the qualities of a great book, just not in the same order,” he said.