Which words a dictionary records is a function of who compiles it; when the lexicographers are educated men, words tied to women's domestic, bodily and working lives are more likely to be judged unimportant and left out. The gap in the record is therefore not neutral but reflects the social position of the people deciding what counts as worth preserving.
A word's inclusion in an authoritative reference depends on documentary evidence, usually printed citations; words that live only in spoken use among people who do not write or publish have no paper trail and so cannot qualify. Oral, lower-class and women's vocabulary is thus structurally invisible to a system that treats print as proof of existence.
A girl named Esme grows up beneath the sorting table in the Oxford scriptorium where her father helps compile the Oxford English Dictionary, and begins rescuing slips of paper with words that have been discarded or never submitted. She assembles her own collection, the 'Dictionary of Lost Words,' gathering terms used by women and servants (like 'bondmaid') that the official project overlooks or deletes.
Treat the meaning of a word as varying by who speaks it and in what life, rather than as a single fixed definition fit for an entry. The same term can carry a tender, intimate or lived sense among women that differs from the formal gloss a male editor would record, so meaning is read as situated in experience, not settled by authority.