When adults are asked about the books they remember most fondly from childhood, the dictionary isn’t usually the first one that comes to mind. That may change with the publication of Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston’s The Dictionary Story (Candlewick, Aug. 6). Their playful and inspired picture book follows a dictionary who, envious of the other books on the shelf, decides to tell a story; things go awry as the definitions come to life and wreak havoc.

The book is Jeffers and Winston’s second book together; they previously teamed up for A Child of Books (2016), a love letter to classic literature, and both were thrilled at the opportunity to reunite. “I think we just used the book as an excuse to spend some time together,” quips Jeffers. He and Winston spoke to Kirkus via Zoom from their studios in, respectively, Belfast and London.

Incorporating photography, typography, painting, and handwriting, The Dictionary Story is a collaboration in every sense of the word. Jeffers and Winston worked on both the story and the visual elements: Jeffers was responsible for the gouache and ink illustrations, while Winston worked with typography, depicting the words in the dictionary vividly moving across the page. The book took roughly seven years to complete and presented numerous challenges.

Coordinating Jeffers’ images with the typography was especially difficult. Referring to a scene where an alligator begins making his way across a page, bumping the definitions out of alignment, Jeffers explains, “We have to know where the alligator is standing and what the words are underneath. So we have to do the drawing first, then work out what words are here, roughly. Then you’ve got to write the definitions. Then I have to redo the drawing to see where the feet, say, interact or there’s some kind of movement in the text.”

To depict the dictionary itself, they used a prop book created by Winston’s partner, Haein Song, a bookbinder. Photographs of the dictionary, which becomes physically distressed over the course of the narrative as the characters make mischief, were integrated into the book. “A lot of time went into the research,” Winston says, from the book’s deckled edges to the pages themselves—archival paper from the 1930s and ’40s.

Though Jeffers and Winston live in different cities, both agreed that they needed to physically be in the same room to create the book. “The way that I work is often very sporadic and spontaneous,” says Jeffers. “And there’s a discipline to Sam’s practice that I greatly benefited from. So he sort of encouraged me gently to protect pockets of time that we could be together and just sort of see what happens. And that was good for my life in general but also was integral to the creation of the project.”

Jeffers adds, “[With] every single project I’ve ever begun…nothing has ever turned out the way that you think it’s going to turn out.” It can be easy for writers to feel disappointed “because it’s not perfect or it’s not going the way [they] thought it would. [But] nothing ever does; you just have to adapt and react as you go.” The strategy applies equally to Jeffers and Winston’s dictionary character, whose story takes some wild turns and who eventually learns to accept herself.

Notably, the book includes actual definitions—but these aren’t the cut-and-dried definitions of Merriam-Webster. Marmalade is referred to as “perhaps the main reason that the universe came into existence,” while rose is defined as “a plant with thorns and scented flowers that gave birth to a million love poems and greeting cards (to varying degrees of success).”

Winston took the lead on crafting the definitions. “There’s 25 pages’ worth of unique definitions,” he says. He estimates the book’s word count as close to 20,000, “which for a picture book is probably a record.” The definitions aren’t front and center; readers could easily overlook how witty they are on a first perusal. “It’s like having a little whisper in someone’s ear whilst they’re reading the book,” Winston says. “That’s a lovely kind of intimate way of meeting adults in some ways.”

Jeffers, who last year published Begin Again, a heavily illustrated work marketed for readers of all ages, hopes that grown-ups will enjoy The Dictionary Story. Though he’s a consummate picture-book creator—kid lit fans will recognize his signature style from The Day the Crayons Quit (2013), written by Drew Daywalt—he’s never set out to write specifically for children. “I’ve always thought that if I can hit that sweet spot of a kid gets it, but an adult gets something from it, too, then I’m entertaining both the memory I have of myself as a child, but also me as a walking, functioning adult.”

The creators’ fascination with words is at the heart of the work. The idea for the project was born in 2001, when Winston self-published a book called A Dictionary Story (trade editions were published later), a work of poetry that makes inspired use of typography. “It basically had words on one side, and it had all the definitions on the other side.…I love the idea...that words are constructed from other words that have their own definitions, [which] are constructed from other words that have their definitions,” he says. “It’s almost like this infinite web.”

Both Jeffers and Winston remember becoming aware of the power of words as children. “My grandma used to say, ‘If you can read, you can cook. If you can read, you can basically do anything.’ And I’ve always thought about that. It’s like a key to unlock anything,” says Jeffers.

Winston, who has dyslexia, struggled with reading as a child but loved stories. “I had a really hellish time with dictionaries and words and language,” he says. He viewed mastering language as a trade-off. “OK, I’ll put in the time to basically work out what this is because I like the fun bit, which is narrative and storytelling....If you can unpack this code, suddenly you’re allowed access into this amazing universe.”

Despite that initially rocky relationship with reading, Winston remained passionate about words and language. To prepare for The Dictionary Story, he visited Oxford University Press, where the Oxford English Dictionary is actually written; he was shown a physical room and told, “‘This is where all the words that aren’t in the dictionary are kept.’ I [thought], Wow, that’s a really beautiful metaphor for how language has a shoreline of what you can and what you can’t say. And our hope is that this book is basically a little bit of that.” Winston urges young people to experiment with those boundaries. “The creative world is just an inch away. Anything can become a story.”

Jeffers and Winston hope that readers of The Dictionary Story will come away eager to play with words, just as the authors did when they worked on the book. Jeffers waxes rhapsodic about his and Winston’s joyful experiences, referring to their collaboration as a “room for play, or as you call it, the sandpit, when we would get together. You can create a sandpit anywhere.” Addressing Winston, he says, “I remember what my daughter said when you were here and her grandmother showed up. She said, ‘Granny, this is Sam. Don’t tell anybody, but he’s secretly a big kid.’”

Winston says, “In Taoism, they’ve got this idea of an uncarved block. Inside, there is every possible sculpture. And for me, that’s what the dictionary is. It’s all the stories, but we haven’t sorted out the punctuation and the order. Hopefully, people see it as a steppingstone into creative writing.”

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.