This chapter traces the complex relationship between Anne Lister and the English dictionary. Lister was an enthusiastic user of lexicons of all kinds - general, bilingual, historical and classical. By the time she turned thirty, she had compiled her own private glossary of erotic and anatomical terms as a means of making sense of her sexuality. In recent years, Lister’s life has been chronicled in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, while her diaries have been sporadically quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus far, however, Lister’s use of and by dictionaries has remained underexamined. On the one hand, though lesbian and queer scholars have provided valuable insights into Lister’s reading habits, they have not given sustained attention to her reading of dictionaries. On the other hand, dictionary scholars have until lately neglected the history of women lexicographers, while women’s writing in general has been underrepresented in the quotation banks of dictionaries from Samuel Johnson’s to the OED. This chapter begins by exploring Lister’s imaginative use of dictionaries, then surveys how her idiosyncrasies of speech and writing diverged from the linguistic and social norms endorsed by the standard lexicographers of her day.