To the outside world Mary Pringle was the model of a Victorian wife and mother, but every morning, after she had waved her husband off to work at the War Office, she went into her garden to measure the night’s rainfall via an eclectic range of homemade gauges. She then returned indoors to collect quotations for the dictionary from 17th-century biblical commentaries. (She appears in a chapter called ‘R for Rain Collectors’.) Her enthusiasms, recorded in Murray’s address book, provide a glimpse of the way clever Victorian women, barred from the worlds of education and work, sought alternative expressions of endeavour and community in work for the OED. Pringle’s story also reveals, in the sudden silence of its ending, other forms of female experience. In 1884 her son died, and overnight she stopped collecting both rain and words, fading back into history.