Designer & illustrator Jez Burrows has created a selection of short stories composed using only example sentences from the dictionary.

The project — initiated by the same Jez Burrows who was behind the short fiction and illustration anthology You Are The Friction — gives a new perspective to the example sentences that dictionaries provide to help demonstrate the most probable usage of a word. Every one of the eight stories published so far (with, no doubt, many more to come) is written entirely using example sentences from the New Oxford American Dictionary — with nothing added except some punctuation to piece them together.

Ranging from the poetically succinct to the nonsensical, the dictionary stories are highly entertaining to read through — and with the words that spawned each example sentence underlined for added context, it ends up providing not one narrative but two. The first being the narrative made up from the example sentences, and the second showing the skeleton chain of single words that gave forth to it.

Head to the Dictionary Stories website to see them for yourself. We’re off to see if we can compose a few ourselves…

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