One of the occupational hazards of this job is that I’m constantly flicking through the dictionary, on a mission to find something, only to get waylaid by fascinating words and meanings.

Just now, at the risk of sounding utterly self-absorbed, I looked up the nearest word to my name Christine. Christingle is a Christian service for children, held shortly before Christmas, in which each child is given a decorated fruit with a lighted candle in it. This tradition only started in Britain in the 1960s, although it originated in Germany in 1747 (it was then only a candle).

Christie is a skiing term – a turn in which the body is swung sharply round with the skis parallel, used for stopping or slowing down. The word comes from Norway, and is short for Christiania, once the capital of Norway.

In days gone by, before every home had a PlayStation etc, we used to play the dictionary game, in which one person would call out an obscure word from the dictionary and everyone else would write down a possible definition. The first person would then read out all the definitions, including the real one, and the winner was the one who correctly guessed the real meaning – a game I’m sure many of you have played.

The good news is that although I spend so much time perusing the dictionary, there are still plenty of words that are unfamiliar, because the lexicographers are hard at work adding new words to dictionaries all the time.

Unless you’re a keen cyclist, you may not have heard of audax – ‘a type of long-distance road cycling event in which participants must navigate a route within a specified period of time.’ This is a recent entry in the Oxford dictionary. Photobomb is a recent Collins entry, ‘to intrude into the background of a photograph without the subject’s knowledge’. We’ve all done that, I guess, but now we have a word for it.

Some homes no longer have dictionaries, relying on computers to look up words. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t sit at my desk, thumbing idly through a dictionary, making new discoveries. Here at Lovatts, we are all word nerds, surrounded by dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Some might think we are adorkable – another recent Collins addition, a blend of adorable and dork – ‘socially inept or unfashionable in a charming or endearing way’.

Spare a thought for the lexicographers who make it all possible. In 1746, Samuel Johnson was contracted to write an English dictionary, for the sum of 1,500 guineas. It took him nine years, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He defined the word lexicographer (himself!) as ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words’.

Happy Puzzling!