True Color

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer hired by Merriam-Webster in 1998, traces the unlikely history behind the thousands of elaborate color definitions in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (the Third), published in 1961. The book weaves together the science of color, the business of dictionaries, the politics of standardization, and the largely uncredited work of Margaret Noss Godlove, whose contributions to both the Third and modern color standards were hidden in plain sight for decades.

Stamper opens with her own discovery, around 2010, of these definitions while proofreading entries for a new revision. The entry for "begonia" defines the color as a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, comparing it to colors like "fiesta" and "sweet william." Cross-references lead to still more elaborate entries in a distinctive voice unlike anything in any other dictionary. These definitions, Stamper finds, crystallize decades of overlapping concerns: the rise of color science, the commoditization of color, World War I, governmental standardization, and the limitations of language.

Stamper establishes the scientific complexity of color: physicists describe it as wavelengths of reflected light, biologists point to photoreceptors, neurologists argue it is a brain-generated sensation, and psychologists note that perception depends on context and language. This instability makes putting color into words inherently fraught. The narrative turns to World War I, when German dye imports, which had accounted for 90 percent of the world's synthetic dyes, were cut off. America faced what was called the "Dye Famine," and color became a matter of national defense: the military needed consistent camouflage and signal colors, but different branches used terms like "khaki" to mean different things. The National Bureau of Standards (NBS), a government research laboratory created in 1901, received expanded funding to address these problems.

Stamper surveys earlier standardization efforts, focusing on Albert Munsell, a painter and art teacher who developed a color system based on human visual perception. Munsell measured colors by hue, value (lightness or darkness), and chroma (saturation), spacing them by the smallest perceptible visual difference. The NBS recognized his system as a bridge between science and common use.

The story moves inside the G. & C. Merriam Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Paul Carhart, the managing editor for the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (the Second), needed color definitions. In 1929, he approached Irwin Priest, head of the NBS Colorimetry Section, but Priest refused to define color names, dismissing them as "weird and fanciful" (43). After months of delays, Priest referred the work to Isaac Hahn Godlove, known as I.H., who had a PhD in spectrophotometry, the measurement of how light interacts with substances, and had served as research director at the Munsell Research Lab.

Godlove proposed a revolutionary approach: rather than using only abstract scientific terms, each definition would compare the color to at least two commonly known reference colors, noting differences in hue, lightness, and saturation. The project was disrupted when Godlove's wife, Esther Hurlbut Godlove, died of breast cancer in November 1931, and Godlove's correspondence dropped off. Carhart died by suicide on October 27, 1933, before the Second was published. Godlove wrote a condolence letter and then disappeared from Merriam's files.

Godlove later joined DuPont and became active in the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), an interdisciplinary organization formed in 1931 to address color standardization. He mapped everyday color modifiers like "dark," "light," and "bright" onto the Munsell color space and discovered that these descriptors occupied systematic zones rather than being arbitrary. He proposed a rubric using twelve English words, the adverb "very," and the suffix "-ish" to name any color scientifically. Dorothy Nickerson, a colorimetrist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), published a paper on this system in 1940, calling it the "ISCC-NBS method." In 1945, Godlove offered to revise all color definitions for the next Merriam-Webster edition at no cost.

At Merriam-Webster, Edward Oakes, an assistant editor who used a wheelchair due to polio, had become the company's operational anchor. He proposed that the next dictionary be a "pure dictionary" (104) stripped of encyclopedic material and was cautiously interested in Godlove's system but skeptical: the definition of "lilac" as light grayish red contradicted the universal association of lilacs with purple, and hundreds of distinct colors would share identical definitions. In 1951, Philip Babcock Gove was promoted to managing editor over Oakes. Gove was blunt and demanding, imposing a rule of silence on the editorial floor and driving staff away at an alarming rate. Oakes became the buffer between Gove and a demoralized staff.

Over years of correspondence, Godlove refined his paradigm: each definition would begin with the ISCC-NBS category, then compare the color to commonly known reference colors. Defining slips, the worksheets Merriam used for individual dictionary entries, arrived in volume starting in August 1953. Godlove completed approximately three thousand entries in seven months while holding a full-time job and leading multiple professional organizations. Oakes declared Godlove's definitions "sacrosanct" (178), but Godlove's health was failing. In June 1954, Oakes forwarded a letter from Godlove to Gove with the note, "The man is low" (183). On August 8, 1954, Godlove died following emergency surgery. His second wife, Margaret, assured Oakes she had only a dozen defining slips left to complete.

Stamper reveals that Margaret was far more than the stenographer Merriam-Webster took her to be. A 1927 Oberlin College chemistry graduate, she had been hired by DuPont as a file clerk despite her qualifications, reflecting the systematic exclusion of women from scientific careers. She married I.H. in 1949 and became deeply involved in his color work. Archival evidence shows I.H.'s letters increasingly used "we" and named Margaret as the person completing definitions, indexing colors, and taking measurements. The output's pace was unsustainable for one person working part-time. After I.H.'s death, Oakes directed complex technical questions directly to Margaret, whose answers were thorough, precise, and prompt. I.H.'s granddaughter Karen, shown the definition of "begonia," told Stamper: "I never met I.H., but I saw Margaret in that definition" (214).

After I.H.'s death and Oakes's resignation in 1956, when his disabilities had worsened until he could no longer concentrate, the definitions entered a second editing phase overseen by editors who lacked understanding of the Godlove paradigm. Staff turnover, misfiled index cards, and Gove's accelerating production schedule caused systematic damage: revised definitions were lost and replaced with inferior versions, and carefully separated entries were incorrectly merged. Gove himself revised the definition of "color," producing a convoluted entry that obscured the original's clarity. The color plates, limited to two pages, lacked the reference color chips that would have made the system comprehensible.

The Third was released in 1961 to fierce criticism. Critics attacked it as evidence that scientific methods were degrading language and culture. Linguists praised its principles in academic journals, but these reviews reached few general readers. Nickerson, frustrated by broken promises regarding the color plates, later provided color definitions for the competing American Heritage Dictionary, though budget cuts truncated her contributions.

Margaret continued her color work. In 1955, she joined Davidson and Hemmendinger, a color measurement firm founded by I.H.'s former colleagues, and performed the core technical work for the glossy edition of the Munsell Book of Color (1958), producing color samples that became the worldwide standard for industries including plastics and automotive paint. She also produced the 267 glossy color chips for the ISCC-NBS standard supplement in 1965, completing a project I.H. had begun in 1931.

Stamper concludes by attending the 2018 ISCC conference, where she finds the ISCC-NBS standard was never widely adopted, eclipsed by competing color systems. Merriam-Webster abandoned the Godlovian defining formula in 1967. Yet the book's closing meditation suggests that the failure of standardization is itself revealing: Color names work best when felt rather than measured, and the human mind is too inventive to be content with any single standard.