The dictionary was begun on a Tuesday in October of 1923, in a stone house in the village of Sant Martí Vell, by a schoolteacher named Joaquim Plaça.

Plaça was thirty-one. He had been collecting words for three years already, on the backs of school attendance sheets, but the formal project began that Tuesday because, his diary records, the weather had turned and there was nothing else to do.

The dictionary was to be a record of the spoken Catalan of the Empordà region. Not the literary Catalan being standardized in Barcelona, but the Catalan of farmers, fishermen, and old women.

Plaça worked on it for thirty-six years. He died in 1959, with the manuscript at the letter p.

His son, Martí Plaça, was a notary in Girona. He took over the dictionary in 1962, after a three-year gap in which he had told himself he would not.

Martí worked through the Franco years, when Catalan was officially suppressed, by keeping the manuscript in a locked drawer and adding entries only on Sundays.

He finished the letter p in 1971. He finished the letter s in 1989. He died in 2003 at the letter v, with one volume completed and one half-completed.

His son, Jordi Plaça, is a software engineer. He is fifty-eight. He inherited the dictionary in the form of seventeen cardboard boxes, three filing cabinets, and a typed manuscript his father had been keeping in a fireproof safe.

Jordi did not begin work on the dictionary for nine years. He has explained this, in interviews, by saying he needed the time to learn to read his grandfather's handwriting.

“Jordi did not begin work on the dictionary for nine years.”

The first letter Jordi finished was v. He finished it in 2014. He has said the hardest entries were the ones his grandfather had drafted but not completed.

The grandfather's drafts were, Jordi says, the dictionary at its truest. They contained the words his grandfather had heard from a specific person on a specific day. They contained marginal notes like old Roser, the one with the dog, said this on a Thursday.

The grandson could not verify the words. Old Roser had been dead for sixty years. The dog had been dead for sixty-three. There was no one left in the village who remembered the phrasing.

Jordi made a decision. He would include the entries, and he would include the marginal notes, and he would mark them with a small symbol indicating unverifiable, recorded by JP, c. 1940.

He has said this was the only intellectually honest choice. He has also said it nearly stopped the project.

The dictionary was completed in November of 2025. It is one thousand four hundred and seventy-two pages long, in three volumes, hand-bound by a binder in Girona.

It contains approximately forty-one thousand entries. Approximately three thousand of them are marked unverifiable.

Jordi has printed two hundred copies. One is in the National Library of Catalonia. One is in the library of the University of Girona. One is in the school in Sant Martí Vell where his grandfather taught.

The others have gone to scholars, to friends, to two libraries in the United States, and to a Catalan-speaking community in Alghero, Sardinia, which received four copies.

I asked Jordi, when I visited the village in March, what he had learned in the eleven years of finishing the dictionary.

He said he had learned that his grandfather was a more patient man than his father, and that his father was a more careful man than his grandfather, and that he himself was neither.

He said he had learned that a dictionary is not a list of words. It is a record of a particular ear, listening at a particular time, in a particular kitchen.

He showed me one of the entries his grandfather had drafted. It was for a verb, esmunyir-se, meaning to slip away unnoticed.

The marginal note read: used by my mother when she did not want my father to know she was leaving the room.

Jordi said he had thought, when he read the entry, that he might cry. He had not cried. He had typed it in. He had added the symbol.

"That is the dictionary," he said. "That is what we made."