True Color

“Immensely likable… Stamper is something of a rock star in the ‘word-nerd’ universe… In the most enthralling sections of the book, Stamper… dig[s] into the archives of Merriam-Webster to tell the stories of the men and women searching for a way to define color… Lively… Stamper’s book is about color, but it’s a sneakily insightful philosophical treatise on what it means to define anything at all.”
—Deirdre Mask, The New York Times Book Review

“A dictionary may seem objective, but Stamper proves that it is deeply human as she highlights the personalities, disputes, drama, and enthusiasm… behind the work of creating one.”
—The New Yorker

“Imagine The Pitt set in a 1950s office, with paperclips instead of heart monitors… In writing about the making of dictionaries, Stamper offers the kind of elemental story people crave: a privileged look inside a subculture whose multitudinous gears and levers have been hitherto hidden to outsiders. Whether depicting the world of a free soloist or that of an F1 driver, the inside dope on the specific languages and equipment and agendas that comprise any number of esoteric human pursuits are manna to readers… Stamper’s improbably entertaining chronicle of the struggle to authoritatively name the inherently unnameable is a nerd classic… In restoring color to the people and events of a past time, her book embodies the essence of its subject: life, like the making of a dictionary, is nothing if not colorful.”
—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Brooklyn Rail

“An utterly delightful book about an unlikely topic: the quest to define different colors in dictionaries, especially before color plates were included. It is easy enough to describe a chair, but how do you explain azure?…. The way it all gets resolved, and the personalities involved in this pursuit, makes True Color as magical as a rainbow.”
—Air Mail

“Color… proves surprisingly difficult to pin down in words… In True Color Kory Stamper investigates the curious entries tucked into Webster’s Third New International Dictionary—and the brilliant, obsessive scientist who wrote them… True Color is also a vivid account of the nearly Sisyphean task of compiling a dictionary for a living language… Ms. Stamper is an engaging guide, and her curiosity about language, science and odd characters animates the book… Exuberant.”
—Belinda Lanks, Wall Street Journal

“In a narrative voice I can best describe as simultaneously cozy, chatty, raucous, and intensely authoritative, the great Kory Stamper guides us through a modern history of the tortuous attempts, as they played out at the Merriam-Webster dictionary company, to quantify and define, in words, something that seems to resist both quantification and definition (in words): color. And it’s an enthralling journey, including, amid a prickly dramatis personae, its centerpiece portrait of Isaac Hahn Godlove, a brilliant scientist drafted into the lexicography business, one of the most fascinating people you’ve surely never heard of before. True Color is wildly entertaining and bountifully informative; I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more.”
—Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer’s English

“Color is a secret, maddening, and hilarious language, and Kory Stamper defines it brilliantly.”
—Simon Garfield, author of Mauve

“An interesting and witty book about how black-and-white dictionaries cope with the complexity of color, True Color shows that the history of the visual spectrum is inextricable from the history of lexicography.”
—Adam Aleksic, New York Times bestselling author of Algospeak

“A delightful romp through the irrepressible, slippery, and often confounding world of color and lexicography, supported by an appropriately colorful cast of characters.”
—Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret Lives of Color

“Funny, illuminating, and meticulously researched. I’ve been waiting for this book for twelve years and I was still blown away by what’s inside.”
—Gretchen McCulloch, New York Times bestselling author of Because Internet

“Lively… Filled with opinionated, insistent, stubborn characters who devoted their lives to accuracy… A fresh, irreverent history of words.”
—Kirkus

“Stamper takes readers on an uproarious journey into Merriam-Webster’s somber early-20th-century office and the decades-long, behind-the-scenes kerfuffle over the seemingly simple task of defining colors… Stamper depicts the esoteric editorial wrangling and nitpicking with verve, bringing a self-serious, cloistered world to vivid life. She also poignantly profiles the devoted relationship between Godlove and his equally brilliant wife Margaret, who finished his work after his death… Stamper writes with grace and a delightful sense of humor, particularly when making fun of her own camp… A scintillating journey into the prismatic heart of a subject that ‘touch[es] everything.’”
—Publishers Weekly, starred