Defin­ing what we mean by the term dict­ion­ary is a relat­ively straight­forward matter; defin­ing what we mean by a term like ‘the unexp­lained’, rather less so. After all, we’re not talk­ing about a sub­ject area with agreed para­met­ers but a mass of fre­quent­ly contra­dict­ory data drawn from a wide vari­ety of sourc­es and pro­vok­ing, more often than not, vio­lent dis­agree­ment rather than happy con­sensus.

Editor Una McGovern and her team, then, should be con­grat­ul­ated for att­empt­ing to create a one-volume refer­ence work that casts its net across such vast, stormy seas of the improb­able and impond­er­able and spreads out the vari­eg­ated catch in an ord­ered manner.