True Color

“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