The Orin–Hal phone call (p. 1011)
‘Samizdat. Russian compound noun. Soviet twentieth-century idiom. Sam—stem: “self”; izdat—undeclined verb: “to publish.” I think the literal denotation’s technically archaic: the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned when the Eschaton-era Kremlin was going around banning things. Connotatively, the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby.
Context
Asked what a word Orin "can't find in the dictionary" means, Hal produces an instant O.E.D.-grade entry — morphology, denotation, connotation, usage history — for samizdat, the word that names his father's lethal last film. The lexical prodigy's biggest set piece: the novel's central secret defined, stem by stem, by the person it most concerns, for a spy at one remove. (Quote ends mid-speech — Hal's sentence runs on in the raw, hence no closing quote mark.)