By any sane reckoning Ammon Shea is a vocabularian – one who pays too much attention to words.

In a single, gruelling year, the sometime furniture removal man, busker and gondolier from New York has read the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover.

He has returned from his adventure in the far reaches of the English language with a rich harvest of obscure and forgotten words to share: indispensable gems such as “deipnophobia” (fear of dinner parties) or “apricity” (the warmth of the sun in winter). In return he suffered back pain, problems with his sight and constant headaches.

As his book, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary, makes clear, Mr Shea’s feat failed to make him a better person, improve his conversation or make him appear more intelligent. Rather it turned him into a mafflard (a stuttering or blundering fool), bedevilled by onomatomania (vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word).

“It had a horrible effect on my ability to interact with people,” said Mr Shea, whose book is published in Britain on October 16. “There was such a profusion of words in my head I almost lost the ability to speak and ended up stuttering or groping for words like some kind of blithering idiot. Most of the time it wasn’t that I forgot the right bon mot; it was that I would forget the word for bread or shoes.” The statistics of Mr Shea’s eccentric achievement are formidable: 59 million words spread over 21,370 large pages of small print, the equivalent of reading the entire King James Bible every day for two and a half months or a new John Grisham novel every day for more than a year.

The section devoted to words beginning with the prefix “un”, nearly all of them tediously self-explanatory, is twice as long as The Lord of the Rings and there are more than 30,000 citations from Shakespeare alone.

Perhaps only a man who lives and breathes dictionaries could have completed the task. Mr Shea has been reading them in his free time for ten years; this week he is making a “terribly exciting pilgrimage” to Oxford to meet the OED’s compilers for the first time.

New acquaintances tend to question his sanity but, luckily for Mr Shea, his girlfriend, Alix, was a lexicographer before she became a psychology professor, so she has some understanding of his obsession. They share their apartment with about one thousand dictionaries. Mr Shea, 37, began his attempt at home in the summer of 2006. Somewhere near the word “avenge” he experienced alarming physical proof that spending ten hours a day squinting at a dictionary is unhealthy when his vision turned grey for several hours.

Car alarms, noisy neighbours and the desire to cross-reference what he was reading with his other dictionaries all conspired to distract Mr Shea. So he moved to a deserted basement in a university library to read among books in French that didn’t tempt him to stray because he couldn’t understand them.

His book relates a tale of physical deterioration, endless cups of coffee and emotional disintegration. At one point, he catches a glimpse of himself in a glass door: “I saw a man with hair askew in all directions, an ink-stained shirt partially untucked, and unlaced shoes, who was talking to himself.”

Mr Shea’s experience was, however, mostly pleasurable. “It was incredibly engaging and engrossing. Sometimes I would wake up and start reading at three in the morning because I was so excited. A dictionary has all the qualities of a great book, just not in the same order,” he said.

“A word like ‘remord’ – to remember with regret – elicits from me a sense of pathos and sadness, thoughts of things in my life that I have had regret for.

“There are moments of humour, usually unintentional, such as ‘unbepissed’, which means ‘not having been urinated on’. Then there are the words that give me a small and vicious pleasure, like ‘bayard’, which is particularly apt for our rabid election season. It describes a person who has the self-confidence of the ignorant.”

Mr Shea’s love affair with the OED has proved an enduring one. Although in his bleaker moments he fantasised about bingeing on airport novels, he has found all other reading matter unsatisfying since reaching “zyxt” (a verb meaning “to see”), the last word defined in his edition of the OED.

So he has started reading it again, for fun.

So, what is the proper term for a fear of dinner parties?

Accismus(n) An insincere refusal of a thing that is desired (as in “no, please, I really would like for you to have the last doughnut ”)

Bayard(n) a person armed with the self-confidence of ignorance

Deipnophobia(n) fear of dinner parties

Paracme(n) the point at which one’s prime is past

Petrichor(n) the pleasant loamy smell of rain on the ground, especially after a dry spell.

Scrouge(v) to inconvenience or discomfort a person by standing too close

Somnificator(n) one who induces sleep in others

Unbepissed(adj) not having been urinated on; unwet with urine

Wine-knight(n) a person who drinks valiantly

Yepsen(n) the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; the two cupped hands themselves

Source: Reading the OED by Ammon Shea

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist