1173. This week, we talk to former Merriam-Webster editor Kory Stamper to discuss her new book, "True Color." We look at the obsessive, "dictionary-ese" world of color definitions, looking at why the dictionary includes over 3,000 color names like "begonia" and "fiesta," and why the experts once insisted that "gray" and "grey" were actually two different colors.
1173. This week, we talk to former Merriam-Webster editor Kory Stamper to discuss her new book, "True Color." We look at the obsessive, "dictionary-ese" world of color definitions, looking at why the dictionary includes over 3,000 color names like "begonia" and "fiesta," and why the experts once insisted that "gray" and "grey" were actually two different colors.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Kory Stamper, author of previously "Word by Word," but she has a new book out called "True Color," which is just this amazing book about the quest to define color terms. Kory Stamper, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Kory Stamper: Thanks so much for having me, Mignon.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm so delighted to see you. So, you know, I think I remember the original blog post where you stumbled across these definitions. Can you explain for people how you started down this path?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, absolutely. So for those who don't know, I used to be an editor at Merriam-Webster. I wrote dictionaries for a living. And in 2010, we were taking "Webster's Third New International Dictionary Unabridged," big monster of a dictionary and putting it online. And one of my jobs was to go through and make sure that what was in print ended up online properly. So I proofread. And I happened to stumble on these weird definitions for color names that were dictionary definition-shaped but just had this really fascinating and unique voice. And they made no sense.
Mignon Fogarty: So confusing.
Kory Stamper: So confusing, but also so clearly delineated. Someone had put so much thought into this. So I, as sort of, you know, on coffee breaks or proofreading breaks, I'd go through and I'd find a color name, and then I'd follow it through the dictionary, because each color name has these supplemental distinctions with other colors. So I'd go chasing color names through the dictionary. And that started me down this path of who wrote these? Why are they styled this way? Why does this defining style never appear in another Merriam-Webster dictionary again? That's really what, sort of, that was the sluice that took me down the rabbit hole.
Mignon Fogarty: So what's an example of one of these intriguing definitions?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, I'm going to read the very first one that grabbed me. I would like to say I have these memorized, but you'll see very shortly why I don't have them memorized.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, there's a lot. How many are there?
Kory Stamper: There are over 3,000 color names in "Webster's Third."
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Kory Stamper: It’s a ton. It’s a ton of color names. So this is the color definition for Begonia: “A deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, see coral 3B, bluer than fiesta and bluer and stronger than Sweet William, called also gaiety.”
Mignon Fogarty: Oh! What is sweet-william?
Kory Stamper: Or fiesta! What's—why is fiesta a color name? It's not a color name I've ever heard before.
Mignon Fogarty: Makes me think of dishes.
Kory Stamper: Right! That's what I thought of, Fiestaware. Or is it—is it another color used in fashion from the time? I genuinely don't know. And so you can see why I was so fascinated and so intrigued by all these color names.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and definitions are typically so precise. It seems out of sorts with the other kinds of definitions in the book.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, so the "Third" has a very, very, not just precise, but very almost scientific or technical voice to it. It's very dry; it's very just formulaic in ways that we recognize now as "dictionary-ese." So "the state or condition of" or "of or relating to," those are things that started with "Webster's Third." And these, they're all consistent, or most of them are consistent with each other, but they have this really unique voice. And so to me it was clear, well, these were probably not written by someone on the Merriam-Webster staff. Maybe they were written by another consultant.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, because there's an army of consultants behind all the definitions. How many consultants worked on "Webster's Third?"
Kory Stamper: So there are 202 named consultants in the masthead. I say named because it was really clear, as I was digging in that there were dozens and hundreds of other consultants who maybe came in and offered one or two definitions or were tapped to handle a very small thing, or just did work sort of on their own and under the aegis of another one of the consultants. So it's possible that there might be a thousand special editors who contributed to the "Third."
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Kory Stamper: But we really—we only know about 202.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, what an amazing management challenge. I mean, one thing that jumped out at me in the book is the constant struggle between the color scientists and the way average people, like a normal person, would think about color. And it seemed like they were constantly at odds, and the people at the dictionary were trying to like ring out understandable definitions from the various experts over the years.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, it's absolutely true. Color science at this point in time—so this would have really started in the '30s, '40s, and '50s—was kind of undergoing this huge revolution. We were learning all sorts of new things about colors, about color perception, about color observation, about how to make colors, about new kinds of colors. So there was this huge boom in how people engaged with color, how science thought about color. But the way that the dictionary's written is it's not really geared towards, you know, flashy new stuff. We want things to be standard; we want things to be established. And so there was this push-pull between how do we communicate this for a lay audience? The science is great, but if no one's going to understand it, then we can't include it in the dictionary. And how do we maintain the accuracy and scientific rigor that's already present in many of these definitions and which we want to present in the unabridged dictionary? You know, "Webster's Third" was really geared as a new dictionary for a new age. So we want it to be scientifically and technically rigorous, but it has to also be understandable.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. No, it's interesting. When I think of color, the first company that comes to mind for me is Pantone. But it seems like DuPont was like a much bigger deal than I realized back in the days when they were working on these definitions.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, you know, Pantone is kind of a latecomer to the color field. Pantone didn't really start until the '60s. And it has a very specific place in color. It is a color marketing and forecasting place. And that means that color science, all of these things that sort of led to color marketing, were really the foundational things. DuPont was a huge, huge player in color science and in the production of color. General Aniline & Film—it's now known as GAF, most people know them because they make roof tiles—but they had a huge color research laboratory. And there were other smaller companies that were really involved. Lots of paint and pigment companies, National Lead, Pittsburgh Paints, they were the manufacturers of color. And they really sort of drove color science forward and understandings of color forward so that folks like Pantone could come in later and apply marketing and sort of sales savvy to it.
Mignon Fogarty: And it was even like the pharmaceuticals mattered. Like talk about blackish-white. What a weird color name.
Kory Stamper: So the origin of so much of this work that was done for the "Third" really came from one group that was looking at trying to solve a problem for one particular thing. That thing was the "US Pharmacopeia," which is still around. It's basically the list of all of the manufactured drugs in America. And back in the '30s, 1920s, the teens, the "Pharmacopeia" did not have pictures. And so the "US Pharmacopeia" had descriptions, color descriptions of all of these ingredients. And it was a really important thing to be able to accurately describe the colors of things. But they were not so good at it. And so you got some things that were described as blackish-white. Powders that were blackish-white, which I would personally call gray, but you know, who am I to naysay the "US Pharmacopeia"? Reddish-green, which if you know anything about the color wheel, red and green are on sort of opposite sides. So what is that? Are they meeting towards blue? Are they meeting towards orange? What's happening? So these descriptions were really unhelpful to pharmacists. And the "US Pharmacopeia" went to a group of scientists and color measurement folks and said, “We just need a plain language, consistent way to describe colors.” And that's the first thing that got this group of scientists and artists and chemists all thinking about how do we come up with a plain language way to talk about and describe color accurately that doesn't depend on images, pictures, examples.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I mean, let's go back to the color wheel for a second, because, you know, one of the things that jumped out also is there are so many different ways of categorizing color, and different people had different ways. And I was like, what do you mean red, blue, and yellow aren't the primary colors?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, I know.
Mignon Fogarty: I know! What are these scientists saying?
Kory Stamper: Oh, yeah. And this is the thing that is so fascinating to me about color is it's very similar to language. There are, you know, it's all about context. So there are different types of primary colors depending on what you need them to be primary for. Most folks know CMYK because that's your home printer takes cyan, magenta, yellow, and black cartridges. Black was always called "key." Those are used in printing. If you deal with light or you're trying to fix your monitor or your TV, that uses RGB, red, green, and blue, because those are the wavelengths of light. If you're talking about color psychology, well, you can have four primary colors, five primary colors, six primary colors, depending on whose model of color psychology you're using. Basically what a primary color is, is it's a main color within one system of colors. All color scientists will say red, green, and blue are not the right primaries for what they're used for. But they are a set of primary colors.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, the dictionaries, they have color chips or charts in them, and I think you have some that you can show us that they tried to use to make it more clear but didn't always hit the mark there either, right?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, I do. Let me—I have two enormous dictionaries here, so
Mignon Fogarty: This is the weightlifting that word nerds get.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, it is. We'll start with the early one, which is "Webster's Second New International Dictionary." So "Webster's Second" was published in 1934, and it had color charts that were considered very scientifically accurate and rigorous for that period, but not helpful. And I'll show you why.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay. So for the people—oh, that is a huge book. For those who are listening, it's probably like eight inches, six to eight inches thick. It's very, very big.
Kory Stamper: Yeah. I think it weighs close to 20 pounds. I don't have a lap big enough for it is my problem.
Mignon Fogarty: So this is “Webster’s Second.” And oh, my gosh! It has the—so it—how can I describe this? There are—so there's a rainbow strip at the top, but then there's like color hues, different things of lightness and darkness at the bottom. But in the middle, there are squares, and they're all askew, like they aren't in a straight line, it looks like someone just threw them out on a table.
Kory Stamper: They are, and it does look exactly like that.
Mignon Fogarty: Why aren't they in straight lines?
Kory Stamper: So those color charts were put together by one of the consultants. His name was I.H. Godlove. And he ordered those charts and chips the way that he did not because he wanted to give an orderly accounting for every color that was entered in the dictionary. That wasn't the point. To I.H. Godlove and to many people who were consultants for the dictionary of that era, the 1930s, the dictionary is a didactic tool. So these charts are meant to teach you lessons about color as opposed to telling you what color that particular chip is. So we have the painting of the spectrum at the top, so that gives you a sense of what the visible spectrum's radiation looks like. Then we have the weird scatterplot, you know, it looks like the photographer sneezed right before he hit the shutter. And those are not ordered in any way. They literally—it looks like someone just picked up a bunch of chips and threw them up in the air and took a picture of where they landed.
Mignon Fogarty: What was the purpose?
Kory Stamper: The purpose of that is to get you to look at how your brain and your eye pick out certain colors next to other colors. So some of those chips are what we would call, you know, opposing hues. So green or purple or red or orange and blue and purple, right? So they're next to each other. Some of them are opposing values, so some are really dark and they're hard to see and some are really bright and they're easy to see. It's meant to tell you and help you see that your brain doesn't see color the same way across the whole spectrum and across how every possible value, you know, so lightness and darkness, saturated, unsaturated. It's meant to teach you that. But that's not what people wanted when they came to the dictionary. What they wanted was they wanted to know which of those chips is holly green. And which of those chips is cherry. And which of those chips is, you know, turmeric. And that didn't happen. All those chips have names, and they're listed, but some of the chips repeat. So I think cherry is in there several times. There's three different chips that are labeled “henna.” They're all different colors. They're not the same brown, not the same orange. A bunch of chips that, if you go to the key, they are labeled “unnamed.” So not to say they don't have a name, we're just not going to list the name here. So that's what "Webster's Second" had. When it was pulling together these color plates, the people who pulled it together felt like it was more important to teach people things about how we perceive color, how colors interact with each other, than it was to just list the colors that were defined.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay. And so that was "Webster's Second." And then they started working on "Webster's Third" and they said, we have to do better than that, right?
Kory Stamper: They did. In fact, one of the early ideas that was batted around in-house for "Webster's Third" was we're just not going to have any definitions, we'll just have color plates. Or it'll just be the color name and it'll say “See color chart” and then you can look it up on the color chart.
Mignon Fogarty: In retrospect that seems quite smart.
Kory Stamper: It does seem very smart. It also—it seems smart, but it seems smart from our viewpoint with modern technology, modern printing technologies. So color plates inside of dictionaries are crazy expensive. They're so expensive to produce. And what the in-house editor was talking about would have taken probably dozens if not hundreds of color plates. And dictionaries are commercial objects. So people aren't going to spend $400 on an unabridged dictionary just because we have all these color chips inside of them. The other thing is at the time that “The Third" was produced, color printing was kind of in its infancy. So we still had, you know, problems with inks crocking off onto pages. We had problems with inks fading with light, or getting, you know, smudgy if you're touching them too much, and we all know that kids love playing with the color plates inside a big dictionary. So even though it was a great idea, it just wasn't a practical idea.
Mignon Fogarty: Are there color plates at all in “The "Third"?
Kory Stamper: There are. Let me grab my copy of “The Third."
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
Kory Stamper: And you tell me if you think this solves the problem.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay It's also thick. It might not be quite as thick as the "Second."
Kory Stamper: No, I think this one's about maybe five inches thick. I think this one weighs 13 pounds, a little over 13 pounds. These are things that you learn as a lexicographer. So here we have two color plates in “The third." Here's the first one.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, we've got the color spectrum at the top again, the rainbow. And there's a circle in the middle that's like more like the traditional color circle you might be used to seeing, and then some light and dark stripes at the bottom again.
Kory Stamper: And that is the first page. The real fabulous one is the next page. And that is—hold this up to the camera.
Mignon Fogarty: Whoa! They're these weird blobby shapes, and one's sort of greenish and all the greenish-bluish colors and one's more the yellow-reddish-orangish colors, but they're weird shapes.
Kory Stamper: They are very weird shapes.
Mignon Fogarty: Almost like if you imagine like a—maybe a children's top, the spinning toy, like a top, but then they're askew.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, caved in on one side, a top that's been sat on.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Kory Stamper: So those are the color plates in “The third." You'll notice, those of you listening at home, there was no mention of orderly color chips. There was no mention of labels for colors. This is another attempt to teach people about color. Now, this shows “The Third" relies on sort of the latest and greatest color science, color measurement theory available.
So all those weird shapes, you know, we had mentioned these weird blobby shapes, that is an artistic rendering of what's called “color space.” So if everyone's familiar with the color wheel, right? We think of—we think of a big wheel and it's got the rainbow all around it and maybe your color wheel has some intermediate colors in it, so it might be, you know, you might have orange and purple and green in some parts of it. That's a color wheel. And that's meant to show relationships between colors. But the thing is is that once you start charting more and more and more and more colors, that wheel gets really big. And it doesn't account for things like you can have something, you can have a red that is sort of chromatically the same, but is really—really bright colors is like bright-bright-bright pink and at really dark colors is a burgundy almost a brown. And color wheels don't account for that.
So they took the color wheel, and they made it 3D. So now that weird blobby thing is a rendering of one particular color space called the Munsell color space, rendered as a solid three-dimensional object. And it maps all the colors, supposedly, that you can—that you can see and that you can describe. So that color solid is actually sort of the foundation for these weird definitions that I talked about where we're comparing begonia to fiesta and sweet-william and coral, because what it's doing is it's taking a color like begonia, it's smashing it into the color space, and it's saying color moves in three directions. It doesn't just go light and dark; it doesn't just go from one hue to the other. It also gains and loses what we would call saturation, which is a term that scientists argued about for a long time what that meant. So you can have dull colors, you can have bright colors, you can have light colors, you can have dark colors. And you can have colors that move from one hue like red to another hue like orange. So if you're thinking about how do I want to distinguish begonia from sweet-william, which is another deep pink that's next to it? Well, I would say that begonia is bluer, so it swings in one direction, and lighter, so it's swinging up, than sweet-william. You can start triangulating colors in space. And that helps teach that colors have relationship to each other. Colors exist in relationship to each other just like words exist in relationship to each other.
Mignon Fogarty: So as you came to understand the color space, did you feel like the definitions did a better job, or did you still feel like this doesn't help people who want to know what nile blue is?
Kory Stamper: Both. Yes and. Get you a dictionary that can do both. Once I learned about the color space, it made sense why these definitions were written the way they were. And it's this really lovely way of sort of getting people, whether they realize it or not, to think about color in relationship to other colors. That's really what's important about colors is the way that you perceive a color is affected by all the other colors around it. So it's a really elegant solution. It doesn't work. Because in order for people to be able to latch onto those definitions, they need to know what the colors that those definitions are in comparison to are. And this is really where this whole thing breaks down because color names and their popularity change dramatically from year to year, decade to decade. And so when ‘The Third" was being written, these definitions used colors that were pretty familiar to folks. They were common in commercial applications. But by the time “The Third" was published, after all these definitions were done, lots of those colors had fallen out of use. And new colors were not just being used, but new colors had been developed that weren't even on this space. So Day-Glo colors, hot pink and electric blue, those were brand new colors that were not accounted for in this color solid and so wouldn't have been able to be defined by any of the definers for “The Third." But they're really common to us now. You know, we have a—we know like, oh, hot pink is like way over here in the color solid, off of where it would be normally. And and so that was the real downfall of these definitions. It was a really elegant system that relied on something that's not stable enough for anyone outside of color or anyone two years down the road to be able to make sense of it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one thing that was interesting is how they would go through like the Sears catalog and look at color—the names of colors of things. And there's two things about yellow. There was like controversy about what yellow even is, but then there was this joke that like men couldn't see yellow until the 1960s.
Kory Stamper: Right! Because men's wear was never yellow, it was always maize or gold. And and you know, and that's a—I mean, the Sears catalog is a great example of it's not just that color names change from year to year, but depending on who they're marketed towards, what they're for, they change too. So you can have the same color, and this actually is kind of really common, you might get one fabric manufacturer who's making men's shirting material and they have one yellow. And it's yellow. But depending on what kind of shirt you're making from it, who's selling it, what time of year it is, one company might call that maize, another company might call it old gold, another company might call it orpiment. You know, I mean it's just because colors, especially in the commercial area, colors are named to evoke a feeling in you, to get you to open your wallet and give someone some money. It's not meant to be sort of this colorimetrically accurate standard use. So that's the other thing is, you know, in one catalog you can get the same color object with five or six different names depending on what it's used for.
Mignon Fogarty: And I think this is why the scientists were frustrated because dictionaries are descriptive, so they're trying to help people say this color of this shirt might be this, but scientists are saying that color has a spectrum, like a scientific definition, it can't be all five of those things, right?
Kory Stamper: Exactly. Yeah. And in fact, the main guy who helped devise the color—this color defining formula for “The Third," he was really resistant to including any commercial colors in it because of this. He kept saying, you know, he wrote in a letter to one of his friends, he's trying to measure all the commercial aquas, and he's like, there's 17 different aquas. Which is true! But if you're a scientist, aqua has a very specific boundary. It's a range of colors, but it has a boundary around it. That's not how colors are named. We don't sit down and go, “All right, so the boundary between aqua and turquoise is here, so I can't call this a bright aqua, I have to call a dull turquoise.” Well, no one's going to buy a shirt called dull turquoise. No one's going to do that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, you did—and you mentioned the letters. You—it's clear you did so much archive research, and you read the letters that people wrote back and forth to each other. It seems like it was just an amazing amount of work. Were there moments of discovery that were especially important for the book?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the first moments of discovery was in the middle of defining for “The Third." So “The Third," for those who don't know anything about dictionaries, “The Third" is kind of this mythologically placed dictionary in American history. It came out in 1961. It was widely panned in the press for being, you know, both too scientific and also it included way too much slang for a lot of older people's taste. But “The Third" also took something like 12 or 14 years to write. It was a huge book, it was written under duress, tons of people leaving, people coming in, lots of overturn at the top of the editorial ladder. And over those 12 years, you know, you've got from the mid-'40s to the early '60s really is what the production timeline is. Think of all the things that changed in American life. Think of all the things you had to start tracking. You know, we have everything from the end of World War II, so now we're in the nuclear age, to the beginnings of cancer medications. We have all sorts of—we're discovering new worlds literally, telescopes. We're splitting atoms. We can see the microscopic structure of things. We've created the washing machine and the electric air conditioner. It's kind of—it's impossible to keep track of all of the new things and all of the words that come out of those things. So “The Third" has this mythological status because it was kind of an impossible task. And one of the impossible tasks was sort of keeping all of these special editors, all of these consultants who oversaw everything from chemistry and astronomy down to the Mayan calendar. So it was just a huge undertaking, hundreds of people to keep track of. I.H. Godlove was the definer on "Webster's Third;" he also ended the defining for "Webster's Second." He was brought in at the end to kind of help move it along. And I.H. Godlove I discovered as I was going through and sort of cross-referencing letters to slips, definition slips in the Merriam-Webster archive, I.H. Godlove died in the middle of defining, suddenly. He had a burst appendix; he died in 1954. But there were slips that had his name on them from '55, '56, '57, '58. I kept going; I don't understand.
Mignon Fogarty: From the grave?
Kory Stamper: I know! And so going back through them and reading through them again, it became clear to me that like many of the special consultants for “The Third," I.H. had an assistant who is—I believe after doing all of this work, doing most of the on-the-ground defining. The assistant was making measurements, pulling things together. And that assistant was his wife, Margaret. And Margaret was a scientist in her own right, but one who had to quit her job when she got married because that was how things worked. And she kept her hand in color through some of the organizations that I.H. was involved in, but primarily through defining for "Webster's Third."
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Yeah, amazing. So, we're actually going to talk about Margaret and all the people involved in the Grammarpalooza section that'll be released just for Grammarpaloozians right away, and then it'll come out later for everyone else. And because this is "True Color," this book, it is really—it's a story about color, but it's also a story about the people involved in making the dictionary and especially the color entries, but just in general, it's just a fascinating story about people as well. Now to wrap up the main segment, I have to talk about the color gray, because for like years, for my entire career, I have been telling people that “gray” spelled with an A and “grey” spelled with an E are just the American and British spellings of the word, and that they are not different colors, and people will insist to me that they are different colors, and your book says they are actually different colors.
Kory Stamper: They are actually different colors.
Mignon Fogarty: According to who?
Kory Stamper: Well, not according to the dictionary, which treated “gray” with an A, “grey” with an E just as spelling variants. But several of the color standards and color specialists that were used as sources—as sort of primary sources for writing these dictionaries—differentiate between several different “grays” with As and “greys” with Es. And it's clear that they are different grays, they are different colors. Not always the same way. You know, I did an informal poll years ago and I asked people, tell me if you believe these are different colors, how are they different? And most people, you know, English speakers, mostly Americans, said gray with the A is—they would describe it as things like harder or cooler or bluer, right? So more saturated, bluer. Grey with an E, lighter, yellower. You know, people were like, well, grey with an E is London and gray with an A is a battleship. Which, you know, okay, I guess. So people do see that gray with an A and grey with an E can be used to refer to different colors. And in fact, even today in many color standards that are used in industry or are used in manufacturing color, they are different. They're not spelling variants. Gray with an A is often a different color than grey with an E.
Mignon Fogarty: I listen to the experts and I humbly apologize to everyone to whom I insisted they were the same color. I'm sorry.
Kory Stamper: Me too! Me too! I did it too! Twenty years I was like, “Nah, it's just a spelling variant.” I am reproved.
Mignon Fogarty: So and that is why you should read "True Color." You will learn things, you will learn amazing things about color and words. Kory Stamper, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you if they want to like read more of your stuff?
Kory Stamper: You can find me at KoryStamper.com. I have a blog, like everybody else, and you can find me on BlueSky, Kory Stamper @BlueSky.social.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, thank you.