This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about colour and how we describe it with Kory Stamper. But first, our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms. We “go the extra mile” to “get to the bottom” of why we should “cut idioms some slack.”

Lauren: “It’s easier said than done.” Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get this and many other bonus episodes.

[Music]

Gretchen: Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Her second book is out 31st of March 2026 and is titled, “True Color – The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color – From Azure to Zinc Pink.” Welcome, Kory!

Kory: Thank you. It’s good to be here with both of you.

Lauren: It’s so lovely to have you here. We’re already off to a start where I’m like, “You don’t say /azjuə/?” [Laughter] We’re doing so great. Kory, how did you get into lexicography?

Kory: It was pretty much an accident. Back in my undergraduate, I was a Medieval Studies major, so I studied languages and literature primarily. After I got out of college, I thought, “Well, now what am I gonna do?” I answered – this is how long ago it was – I answered a want ad in the newspaper (in a print newspaper) to be an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster. I got the job and within a few months of being there just realised “This is what I wanna do. This is what I love doing.” And that’s how I got into lexicography. I’ve been a lexicographer now since 1998.

Gretchen: Whoa. And you also wrote a previous book about lexicography, Word By Word, which we also loved and reviewed in one of the very early episodes of Lingthusiasm. We will link to that from the archives. How did you get into writing about lexicography?

Kory: You know, it was an occupational hazard of working at a dictionary company. Merriam-Webster, way back in the dark ages, used to respond to every single piece of consumer mail or email that came in. Most of them were asking – yeah, I don’t think they do that anymore. Please, folks, don’t email Merriam-Webster to ask them questions. I was one of the people that was in charge of answering a lot of that email. There was that coupled with the fact that whenever I would go out or meet new people, they would say, “What do you do?” I’d say, “I write dictionaries.” People would say, “What? How? Why? Who? When?”

Gretchen: “You mean there are people behind those dictionaries? I thought it just appeared from the sea foam like Aphrodite.”

Kory: Exactly. Or “Why do we need to write dictionaries? They’ve already been written.” After a little bit of having these conversations with people over and over, I started a blog where I started talking a little bit about what it’s like to write dictionaries. Why do people write them? What are some of the weird parts of writing dictionaries? The blog took off. People loved it. That’s what led to my first book. That’s led to this book, too.

Lauren: If you can cast your mind all the way back, Kory, how did you get into the research topic for this book?

Kory: It really began as part of the work I was doing at Merriam-Webster. We were moving Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged online. This was a book that was published in 1961. It had never been digitised. Part of my job was to go through and make sure that all of the text-to-HTML conversion went properly. It was a boring slog that I am uniquely built for. [Laughter] I would open up a dictionary page, and I would say, “Okay, I’m starting at ‘Beaufort scale’,” and I’d go through, I’d read the whole entry in print. Then I would go online and make sure, okay, everything’s there. The etymology has rendered correctly. All the special characters are there.

Lauren: That’s really astounding because I can kind of comprehend that dictionaries get made, but I also just assumed that the Webster’s online that we now have also just manifested – someone just went clickity-click-click, and then it was there. But this is a book that was printed in the age of physical print and before digital print files, so it was a big old manual job. It’s thanks to your diligence that it’s up there.

Kory: Yeah, and if there’re errors, those are my fault. I missed those.

Lauren: It’s someone else’s fault. [Laughter]

Kory: I would go through, and I would read through and read through. It’s very important to note that Webster’s Third has a very particular defining style. It’s very dry. It is very formulaic. It seems like it was created in a lab to put you to sleep immediately.

Gretchen: Can you give me an example of a definition in this dry, technical style?

Kory: Absolutely. This is one of the definitions for the noun “street.” It is “a public thoroughfare, especially in a city, town, or village including all areas within the right-of-way such as sidewalks and tree belts and sometimes further distinguished as being wider than an alley or lane but narrower than an avenue or boulevard and as separating blocks rather than penetrating them.” That’s “street.”

Gretchen: That’s “street.” Very clear.

Lauren: So evocative.

Gretchen: Very dry. This is the kind of definition that I think of, really, as a dictionary definition. This is a Webster’s Third definition.

Kory: Absolutely. This is what you’re – as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, you’re used to this style. You know it’s gonna be very formulaic, very dry, very scientific to the point of ridiculousness at times – kind of like with “street.” And then I got to the entry for “begonia.”

Lauren: Which is a flower but also a colour.

Kory: Right. “Begonia” is a flower, and it is also a colour. I got to the entry for “begonia.” I began to proofread it. Yes, the etymology is correct. Yes, the pronunciation characters all rendered correctly. Yes, the flower definition – very scientific. There’s the taxonomy. Then I got to this definition “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’.” I was like, “What is this?”

Gretchen: This feels kind of beautiful.

Kory: And also “bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral” is kind of like, that assumes a whole lot about –

Lauren: I have a lot of questions about “average coral” now.

Kory: Exactly. I didn’t realise that there was such a thing as “average coral.” Like, average in comparison to what? What’s average about it?

Gretchen: I feel like people disagree about what colour “coral” is. If we averaged all their opinions, do we end up with average coral?

Kory: Oh, you would think that. But that’s not what “average” means in this definition.

Gretchen: Oh, no. I also – what colours are “gaiety” and “sweet William”? I’ve never seen those.

Kory: Or “fiesta.” What colour is “fiesta”? Those are like, okay, coral at least I can recognise as a colour, but then you get to something like “fiesta.” I would run into these as I was proofreading. It became my subtle and sly way to take a break while still at my desk. I’d get over one and be like, “Okay, I’m just gonna pick a word, and I’m gonna pick a colour name.” I would pick a colour name, and then I would follow all the links these “bluer” and “brighter than” or “yellower” and “duller than” or “darker and redder than,” and I’d follow those. Inside of these colour definitions, which did have this very particular formula to them, so they kind of were formulaic in the way that Webster’s Third definitions are. It was just ridiculous to me a. how they were structured and b. there were so many colour names that I had never heard of. This is a dictionary that is supposed to be based on common usage.

Lauren: We don’t know three of the colours in that first definition.

Kory: Yeah! I remember in particular one definition – well, now I have to find it, sorry. Give me a second. This is a great example. I got to “coral” – because of course I was like, “What’s average coral?” Went to “coral.” I found coral 3B, which was the one referenced, but then beneath it was another colour definition that reads “a strong pink that is yellower and stronger than carnation rose; bluer, stronger, and slightly lighter than rose Delphia; and lighter, stronger, and slighter yellower than sea pink.” I hit “sea pink” and lost my mind because the sea is blue. What is “sea pink”? That doesn’t make any sense.

Lauren: Whereas I thought “algal bloom,” which is not quite as evocative.

Gretchen: I feel like when I read “sea pink” there, I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the colour the sea is in a sunset when the sun reflects pinkly on the sea.”

Kory: [Laughs] Well, this is the thing, right, you hear a colour name like that that’s not a colour name that’s associated with a thing or with the basic colour categories, and all you have to go on is your own internal association with those words – not necessarily the colour itself. I had no category for “sea pink.” I just was like, “Does not compute.” My brain just stopped working at that point. But I really wanted to know “How did these get into this dictionary?” Because the more that I read, it’s like, these are so rich and textured, and they’re so many of them, and also, these don’t match.

Gretchen: They clearly exist as a system within each other, right, because here’s “begonia” referring to “average coral,” and here’s “coral” referring to “sea pink,” and I assume if you kept going to “sea pink,” it would refer to some other ones that would also be in Webster’s Third. Clearly, there’s some mind or minds behind all of them together as a system.

Kory: Right. And if it’s not something that’s – lots of these definitions were not carried through to other Webster’s dictionaries. It’s kind of like they exist in this frozen time capsule that is the Third. Not just who but why did we not continue to use these? Why is there no definition for “sea pink” in any of the later dictionaries either? It is this weird little – it’s a little puzzle. It’s just a little puzzle. You can put the pieces of the puzzle together by going through the internal archives at Merriam-Webster. That’s how the research really began. I started with these slips, and then 10 years later, I was in archives and knocking on random people’s doors to ask to read their grandparents’ letters, you know, like most people. [Laughter]

Gretchen: Tell us about this research process. As far as I’m concerned, you wrote this cool blog post in 2014, and then when Word By Word came out, you mentioned that a chapter had gotten deleted from that book because it was really its whole own book. And I was like, “I bet it’s the colour chapter because I have been following this colour thing since it was a blogpost. There wasn’t anything about colour in that book.” And I was like, “There should be because I know there’s a really meaty chapter about colour.” How did that become the colour research and the colour book?

Kory: That initial chapter that was cut from my first book Word By Word was kind of about how hard it is to define colours – colour names and the word “colour” itself. What is colour?

Lauren: Let’s come back to that question later.

Kory: Yes. How many hours do we have? How many days do we have?

Gretchen: How many peoples’ entire careers do we have?

Kory: [Laughs] Exactly. My editor said, “This is not a chapter for this book. This is the first chapter of your next book. When you’re done with this book, do the next one.” I said, “Great.” I started by “How do we define ‘colour,’ and why do we need to define ‘colour’ this particular way in the Third?” That led me to – well, it led me to a bunch of places. I’ll try and go in order. It led me first to the in-house archive at Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster is a working publishing company, but they also have this on-site repository of slips, basically, that are production slips and bits of language and draft definitions that go all the way back to the late 1890s. There’re more slips in off-site archives.

Lauren: I don’t think it’s a surprise that an organisation run by people who are meticulously paying attention to language are also meticulous (almost to a fault, I think, with some of the documents you were talking about) at keeping track of everything that everyone writes and everyone touches in the dictionary-making process, which sounds like a nightmare to keep track of but sounds like an absolute treasure trove for putting together the story of colour in this dictionary.

Kory: It was. We’re very lucky that we are all paper hoarders because, you know, everyone kept every slip, every piece of paper, every letter.

Gretchen: The slips are like index cards, primarily?

Kory: They are index cards, yes. There are – inside baseball, there are three primary kinds of slips. There are citation slips, which are white 3x5 index cards; there are definition slips, which are on yellow or buff index cards (those are called “buffs”); and then there are production notes back and forth to each other that are on pink index cards. Those are called “pinks.” Already, the whole system is wrapped in colour. We have buffs and pinks. Going through, for instance, I’d pick “coral,” and I would go over to the giant banks of card catalogues. I’d just start going through “Who came up with this?” I found that we had this name that was not a name that I recognised as any of the staff names that was stamped on all of these. These were all meticulously typed out. The name was “Godlove.” That sends me to the next part of the archive, which is all of these old files for finding what were called “special editors” or “consultants.”

Lauren: This was a real revelation to me that – as though a dictionary wasn’t already enough naming and editorial and administrative work – there are also all these people who aren’t full-time, in-house lexicographers who come in as outside experts.

Kory: And the people who are invited to come in as outside experts are usually at the top of their fields, especially in this era. This would have been the beginning of the 20th Century, from the 1930s onward. Those people – it was not just an extra CV line for those people, but it was also a show the dictionary that this consumer was gonna drop a huge amount of money on was written by the best and the brightest in the industries. The Third had 202 named consultants. There were other consultants that also did work on this, but if you go through the pages in the print dictionary, you’ll see, basically, little CV lines for every single consultant (what their area was).

Lauren: This is like the influencer crossover of its day.

Kory: Yeah, for a very, very niche group of people, for academics, yeah.

Gretchen: Would this be for things like the scientific name of “begonia,” you need to have a botany consultant to do all your plants?

Kory: Exactly.

Gretchen: Or you need to have a chemistry consultant to do your oxygen and your hydrogen, or you need to have an astronomy consultant to do your constellations or something like this?

Kory: Absolutely. It wasn’t just what we think of as the “hard sciences.” There were consultants for everything. I love that there is a consultant listed in Webster’s Third for the Mayan calendar and only the Mayan calendar – like you do.

Gretchen: You need to have someone who knows about it.

Lauren: As though we could ever accuse anyone else of being too niche. What kind of expert was Godlove officially?

Kory: I. H. Godlove was a –

Lauren: What a name.

Kory: – I know, right – physical chemist.

Gretchen: His friends called him “I.H.” They didn’t call him whatever those stood for.

Kory: His full name was Isaac Hahn Godlove. He went by “I.H.” I.H. was a physical chemist. He was employed – at the time that Merriam-Webster first contacted him – he was putting together a colour exhibit for the Museum of Science and Industry in New York. He was a really fascinating guy because he was educated right on the cusp of when colour moved from being philosophical and an applied chemistry (dye stuffs and things like that) to a lot more of the, like, physics/chemistry/optics – a little bit more theoretical. One of Godlove’s biggest contributions to colour science was in illumination. He was a guy who helped measure “What’s the best light to measure colour under? What’s the colour of that light?” We talk about “cool” light –

Gretchen: Oh, wow. I guess you need to know that.

Kory: Things like daylight – your daylight LED bulb, which we now think of as like, “Oh, the daylight bulb is 4,000 lumens” or 4,000 something – he was one of the first people to start measuring those things to say, “Okay, daylight 65 is the optimal way to look at this set of colours. And daylight 50 is used this way.” He was a chemist. He, over his career, worked at DuPont as a dye stuffs specialist. He measured colours in dyes. He then went to the colour research laboratory for General Aniline, which now is GAF – if you know anything about GAF, you know that they make roof tiles. That’s what people know now. He was a very well-respected scientist. He was also a scientist that just had tendrils and links with scientists in all these other areas that touched on colour. He was the perfect guy to get in to define these things.

Gretchen: That’s the cool thing about colour, right, because, first of all, if you want to have clothing or fabric being dyed a particular colour, and you wanna be able to match, okay, the red fabric that I bought last time and the fabric I bought this time, I want to be able to continue making garments out of them and have them be the exact same colour so that I don’t have this top half of the dress in one colour and the bottom half in a slightly different shade of red, or the military camo application where you actually want the military camouflage garments to show up in the same shades of camouflage as the other ones because otherwise it doesn’t camouflage that great. Big point here. But at the same time, paints in things like make-up, dyes for other stuff, product photography, food dyes – there’s so many different areas of life that colour and colour standardisation and colour description in this very precise way ends up touching on.

Kory: Absolutely. It was so interesting to start researching colour because I had not – kind of like when people first become interested in linguistics, and they start thinking about language as something to be studied, you don’t realise how much of your world is affected by different colour standards, different colour formulas. I mean, we get used to thinking of “white” as something that’s colourless, but in fact, white as a product (as a colour) has thousands of different formulas and thousands of different applications. This particular white, which is used as an enamel coating on dryers and dish washers, is not the same enamel white that’s used as a car colour, which is not the same enamel white that’s used on your high gloss bathroom door. It’s these things that we think of as like, “Oh, it’s white,” actually there’s 17 different shades of white in the white that I’m looking at at my wall right now –

Gretchen: And the cross-consistency – because when computers were early on, it was so common to see an image on one of those old CRT screens that like, the colours were very different from what the photo of that object would look like in real life. With early digital cameras or with scanning of things, the colour would often shift dramatically. The colours on the monitors would be dramatically different. These days, when I look up something on my phone, and I’m like, “Oh, I wanna buy this pair of shoes. Here’s what colour they are,” and they show up, I’m not surprised by that colour. We’ve gotten so much better at that.

Kory: Though not always. [Laughter]

Gretchen: That’s fair.

Kory: Not always. One of my favourite things to do when I give talks about colour definitions is I will do a web search for the colour “taupe,” and I will just take all the different swatches that are called “taupe” on one monitor, and line them up. You get everything from like, in context, something that looks really bright yellow to something that’s dark and purple-ish. I think we like to think – or we’re accustomed to thinking – that colour, a colour, and its name are intrinsically tied together.

Lauren: Gretchen and I once had a big fight about colour when we were deciding on the purple that we were going to use when we were designing the LingComm logo. I was like, “I think this is a very balanced, clean – I know purple’s not a primary colour, but it’s a” – what is a called – “a focal purple.” It’s a really non-contested purple. Gretchen was like, “Can we just get something that’s less – can we make it a bit cooler if we want it to be balanced?” It turned out that someone –

Gretchen: Hers was a really grape-y colour.

Lauren: Turns out that someone, who was not me, had the going-to-bed-yellow filter on their screen. [Laughter] For this 30 seconds before we realised what was happening, it just felt like we had both lost touch with reality. Because we, as far as we were concerned, were looking at the same image but seeing very different – but then we realised what had happened. It’s just like – as the need for colour to become more specific and replicable develops and the more scientific methods get created for being specific and consistent, you start to get this gulf between “I’m just a person living my life who’s like, ‘This is a purple-y purple’,” and “I’m a scientist who needs to differentiate between 50 different purples that are all right next to each other.”

Kory: It starts with science, but it moves into all these other things as well. Fashion is a great example of this very common application of colour where you need to have this really clear description of what, you know, this colour, which we’re gonna call “misty mountain,” is – and not just a description of like, “Here’s the formula for creating it,” because those formulas are all different depending on the application and, depending on what they go on, the colour’s not consistent. There’s all these things about colour production where you really, you can’t rely, necessarily, on numbers to get colour across. You do have to have a standardised way of describing it, either with words or in a stable, printed colour standard. Let me tell you, stable, printed colour standards are insanely expensive. Just because you have one doesn’t mean you can match a colour to a colour chip.

Gretchen: “Stable” is an operative word here because we all have old books that are yellowing, which creates the same problem.

Kory: The more you expose things to light, the more they’ll fade. I mean, the whole idea of a colour standard or how to describe colour or how to show colour, this has been a problem since colour has been in use, period. When it was time to write the Third, Godlove was approached – and the whole drive behind Webster’s Third was this is a new dictionary for a new age. Previously, dictionaries, especially unabridged dictionaries, there were consultants and special editors who would write and help, but it was these very like, these long disquisitions on like, “What is an escapement? How does an escapement work? In what applications would one find an escapement?” It just went on. It was very encyclopaedic. When the Third was being conceived of a. the publisher and president was like, “We can’t afford to print a bigger dictionary. The technology does not exist to print a larger dictionary.”

Lauren: We’ve reached the limits of dictionary production technology.

Gretchen: This book is too thick, and we can’t split it into two books because the public doesn’t wanna buy two books.

Kory: Exactly. No one’s gonna buy a two-volume dictionary. That’s stupid. We have to keep it in one volume. The managing editor that they brought in was a linguist. He was someone who was really absolutely convinced that the way that we need to move forward is to get rid of all of this fluff, get rid of all of this cultural information, and really focus on “pure language.” His name was Philip Babcock Gove. He’s the subject of a bunch of different books. He was a very particular man. He had very particular ideas about how to implement things. He very much felt that if this is going to be a dictionary for a new age – this was being written in the early ’50s, so we were just coming out of World War II. We’re in the Cold War in America. We are seeing this big, post-war scientific boom. We’re also having lots of conversations about the place of science in society. Gove said if we’re gonna have this brand new dictionary for a new age, it has to be based on scientific principles because that’s what’s objective. This needs to be an objective record of language. Even still the Third, as a print book, is, I think it’s like 14 lbs. It’s huge. It’s like 11 x 17. It’s an enormous book. Even still, these are enormous books, which is why you can see from a marketing standpoint why Gove wanting to smash it down to just pure language because there’s also a ton of new language to enter into the dictionary. We have all this scientific terminology that’s coming out. Saying this is gonna be a dictionary of pure language also makes it attractive in terms of the idea that this is going to be a universal standard. We love universal standards. We can get them.

Gretchen: Especially in the 1950s and ’60s.

Kory: Oh, yeah, we knew everything in the 1950s and ’60s, let me tell you. Gove said, this is going to be a dictionary of pure language. Whatever gets entered needs to have evidence of current use. Anything technical is going to be defined (as we have done) by the top consultants, by the top minds in their field, but everything is going to be run through an in-house editor to dictionary-ise it.

Gretchen: They can’t just wax on about the hartebeest or whatever.

Kory: And Gove felt very strongly that lexicography was a skill that needed to be taught and honed. Not everyone could do lexicography. He really focused heavily on this really overwhelming workload where he said, all right, all of our in-house editors are defining according to this very rigid style that was brand new, and they’re also overseeing the work of all of these consultants. They are taking what all the special editors are turning it, and they are cutting down into this pure, lovely, Govian definition.

Lauren: They’re also corresponding with the general public. This isn’t the only dictionary Merriam-Webster’s working on at this time. Language just keeps changing, and you have to keep chasing it. I don’t understand how – I mean, I guess lexicographers just live in a permanent state of existential dread.

Kory: Basically. Especially for a dictionary like the Third, it was behind and over budget from jump. There was just no way they were gonna meet any of their production timelines. There were lots of points where certain things were like, “Eh, it’s good enough.” One of those things was this very weird formula for colour defining.

Gretchen: I wanna get back to Godlove. We bring in this colour expert and say, “Okay, you’re in charge of colour definitions now.” What happens?

Kory: Part of what was so fascinating at Godlove – remember I said he had tendrils everywhere. One of those things was that he was one of the founding members of something called the “Inter-Society Color Council,” which was a group of people from arts, industry, and science who agreed to meet together to solve colour problems. Those colour problems were everything from “What’s the best kind of light to use to measure colour?” to one of their earliest problems (it was called “Problem 2”) – Problem 2 was “How do we come up with a plain language way to describe colour?”

Lauren: Sounds like that would be useful for a dictionary.

Kory: Funny that. It wasn’t a dictionary that started it. It was actually what’s called the “US Pharmacopeia,” which was basically a list of all the drugs that were available to pharmacists.

Lauren: Why do we need to worry about colour for drugs? I feel like we’ve just gone down a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole. [Laughter]

Kory: Part of it is because this is also before we had Walgreens and easily compounded medications that were available over the counter. If you needed something from your pharmacist, you would go and say, “Ah, my stomach’s not feeling great,” and they would literally mix up something using different chemicals, using different herbal remedies at the desk. They had the pharmacopeia.

Gretchen: If you want an antiacid, they’re going there and being like, “Okay, well, I’ve got some sodium bicarbonate, and I’ve got something else. I’m gonna add all these things. Here you go. I’ve mixed it together just for you.”

Kory: Exactly. A lot of their basic ingredients – they were all powders or liquids, and they were all brown or white, basically. That’s what you got. But you know, let’s say you’re pulling something – you’ve got acidic titanicum and acidic tartaricum (because also they all use Latin names at this point), and they’re right on the shelf next to each other, and they’re in brown little bottles, you don’t see what they are, you’re grabbing one for the person who has an upset stomach and wants an antacid, and you grab the wrong one, and you mix it, and you’ve actually given them a diarrheal. That’s not great.

Gretchen: No. [Laughter]

Kory: The pharmacopeia was a description of what each of these ingredients was and what it would do and what to compound it with. One of the main descriptions was “This is a powder or a liquid that is this colour” because that was how you could distinguish some of these things. But the colours they used were weird. There was one that the team focused on, this group of people solving their colour-naming problem – one of the drugs was described as “blackish white.”

Gretchen: I didn’t think that’s how colours worked. Do we mean “grey”?

Kory: I know. And why not “grey”?

Gretchen: Not that “white-ish black” is much better.

Kory: And how “blackish” and how “white” – exactly – or “reddish green.” Well, is that “brown”? What is that? The ISCC – the Inter-Society Color Council – decided they were gonna help out the US pharmacopeia by coming up with standardised ways to describe colours using plain language. Again, remember, well before photography was good or was useful in books like this. As they got into it, they realised one of the problems is “How do you describe ‘Here’s one tan powder,’ ‘Here’s another tan powder,’ and they’re slightly different tans. This is a little darker.” But how much darker? What’s our scale here?

Gretchen: Because we don’t have a whole lot of blue powders and green powders that would be really distinct from each other.

Kory: And if this is a “reddish” liquid and this is also a “reddish” liquid, but this “reddish” liquid is “browner” and this other “reddish” liquid is “oranger.” How do you describe that? This overlaps with something that was happening in the sciences where you would get a colour standard. Let’s say someone came to you and said, “Hey, we are a weaving company. We weave cotton. We need to know just by looking at a giant 400 lb bale of cotton whether it’s good quality or not.” We also know that certain people are gonna want cotton to be whiter and brighter, and that cotton that comes in that’s yellower may not be worse quality, but it can’t be used for certain things. Basically, companies would go to government agencies in the US and say, “Give us a bunch of colour cards, so that when we get cotton in” –

Gretchen: “We need a colour grading system for our cotton.”

Kory: “So when we get 700 bails of cotton in, we basically just have a little card we can go through and say, ‘This one’s Grade A. This one’s Grade B. This one’s Grade C,’ based only on colour.”

Lauren: Nifty.

Gretchen: I mean, this same this exists (just to be incredibly Canadian about it) the same thing exists for maple syrup. It gets graded by colour.

Kory: Yeah. Is it golden? Is it amber? Is it dark? Exactly.

Gretchen: In the modern day, they have a little colorimeter. You can put a drop of syrup in, and you look through the little light thing, and it does a little analysis for you, and then it pops something else. How did we get that result?

Kory: Colour measurement was the new hotness in the early 20th Century. The way that it was mostly done before computers was by eye. People would use mirrors or “spinning disks” – that was a great one. People would get a thing that looks like a top that’s tipped up on its side. You put different colours of paper on it and spin that. Then it optically blends into one colour.

Gretchen: Is that a way of seeing how much blue and how much green a colour has in it? Because if you put all the blues and greens on a spinning disk and spin it together, you get a precise shade of purple or whatever?

Kory: Exactly.

Gretchen: That’s clever.

Kory: You can be like, if I take this red card that is this kind of red, and this yellow card that’s this kind of yellow, and this white and this blue that’s this kind of blue, and I’ve got 45% red, and I’ve got 3% yellow, and I’ve got 5% white, that’s gonna spin to be this exact purple.

Lauren: It’s such an early 20th Century story that colour was becoming more scientific as the dictionary is becoming more scientific, but that almost all of this was achieved through men sending very polite but quite terse letters to each other. So much of what I love in True Color is just these men being quite snippy at each other. One’s an expert in colour. One’s an expert in dictionaries. These two meet in these wonderfully fantastical definitions, but it’s a slog to get from “We both have our own agendas here” to what does get produced in the Third.

Kory: Absolutely. There is this constant tension then and now between “Well, this is the technically correct way to think about colour and talk about colour” and this other way is the way that we all experience colour. That was this huge source of frustration for the editors who were dealing with Godlove, and Godlove dealing with the dictionary, was Godlove was saying, “Okay, you’re saying, for instance, the primary colours are red, yellow, and blue. And they are not red, yellow, and blue. Red, yellow, and blue, as subtractive primaries, do not mix to neutral grey.” I will say that anyone who knows anything about colour mixing who’s listening to this will go “Absolutely,” and anyone who does not is like, “What are you talking about?”

Gretchen: I watched Sesame Street, and Sesame Street told me that the primary colours were red and blue and yellow. What do you mean it’s cyan and yellow and magenta? Is that what we’re talking – your printer has those cartridges.

Kory: That’s one set of primary colours.

Gretchen: That’s true. There’s light as well.

Kory: That’s red, green, and blue (RGB). This is where science is going. Science is saying, “We have the technology to pull it apart” – not build it, but we can see now what colour is made of. We can talk about light in this very particular scientific way. We can say that objects do not have colour, that colour is an interaction between light, a stimulus, the eye, and the brain. That’s great for scientists. For anybody who’s not, that’s so bad.

Gretchen: It’s like, “Excuse me, I have a blue water bottle, and it’s just blue. Don’t tell me it doesn’t have a colour, and it’s just a product of my light and the environment. C’mon, look at it. It’s blue!”

Kory: So much of my research in both the internal archives at Merriam-Webster and then going out – I found I. H. Godlove’s grandchildren, and they kept a bunch of his papers. I got to read a bunch of papers there. I got to read in the corporate archives for the Inter-Society Color Council how they developed this plain language way of describing different gradations of colour. But all of this really is this very early 20th Century like, “Dear Sir/Madam” – it tends to be very formal and, yeah, very snippy in the dictionary world.

Gretchen: Your book doesn’t read like that. Your book is much more fun than the “Dear Sir, I have an important point to make.”

Kory: I’m glad to hear that.

Lauren: “I have a numbered list of points that I wish to address at length.” [Laughter] We have done a Lingthusiasm episode on colour. In that, we started with a big research project from 1969 by a team called Berlin & Kay, who figured out what the boundaries of the basic term colour terms are for English speakers. This was replicated for a bunch of other languages. It’s so funny because teaching the linguistics of colour terms, the story starts for me in 1969, but Berlin & Kay could only have done that work if all of this 20th Century scientific standardising of “Can we get some objective labels to consistently represent colours for blues and greens and reds? And then we can give them to people, and they can have a big old argument about the boundaries of those colours.” What is the start of that earlier colour episode for us is really something that comes very late in True Color, where it comes full circle back around to that perception and general usage for colour names and really basic colour terms.

Kory: What’s really fascinating is the work that Berlin & Kay did, and the rubric that they came up with in saying – for those of you who don’t know, Berlin & Kay basically did a big study to say not just “What are the boundaries of the basic colour terms?” – like, when I say “basic colour term,” I mean, when you’re describing “magenta” or “cerulean” to someone, what’s the colour bucket you put that in? Is “magenta” a pink or is it a purple for you? Is “cerulean” a green or a blue? Those are the basic colour terms, those buckets. What Berlin and Kay’s work did was to say, “Here are the 11 buckets that we all sort colour into. These are our basic colour terms.”

Gretchen: In English.

Kory: In English. They also did some work to say, “When other languages (that are not English) add colour terms, they add them in a particular order.” Now, that’s hotly debated. We won’t get into that. But the idea was that there are, in fact, these basic colour terms that we can use. The thing that’s fascinating is that work that Berlin & Kay did, and that a lot of people say, “Ah! These basic colour terms date back to 1969 – the Berlin & Kay study,” those basic colour terms actually had been in use and were codified in Merriam-Webster dictionaries and through the Inter-Society Color Council’s work 30 years prior to Berlin & Kay – 40 years prior to Berlin & Kay. There is something about, you know, colour language is like all language, we do have a shared experience of it. There are things that we can all agree on, like that there is a difference between red and orange. Now, where that difference is, we’ll argue about that forever. We do think of it in linguistic circles as the beginning of colour terminology, but it really comes at the end. It’s built on dozens and dozens of years of work prior.

Gretchen: One of the most exciting things for me was getting about three-quarters of the way through True Color and then being like, “Hold on, wait, we’ve been missing part of the story.”

Lauren: Especially if Gretchen has her night filter on.

Gretchen: [Laughs] But I also want people to be able to have that experience fresh, especially because this episode goes up a few days before True Color comes out, I really encourage people to get it and read it. I don’t wanna necessarily spoil people for that. I wanna know everything about how the research for this came to be, but I also don’t wanna spoil people before they’ve had the chance to read it. Please stay tuned in two weeks to the Lingthusiasm Patreon where we will have this bonus episode. You have time to read the book first. You also have time to get on the Patreon and listen to the previous bonus episodes. If you’re lucky enough to be listening from the future, and everything is out already, you may be able to just get it right now.

Lauren: I enjoyed the plot twist so much that we are going to leave you with the opportunity to read True Color when it comes out at the end of March. Then we’ll do a bonus episode where we’ll chat with Kory about –

Gretchen: I’m so sorry to do a cliffhanger, but we can’t fit all of this interesting colour nerdery in one episode anyway, so this way, you get to hear from Kory twice.

Lauren: Lucky you! Kory, if you could leave people knowing one thing about language, what would it be?

Kory: I think one of the things I love telling people about language, and one of the things that I hope people remember about language, is we are taught to think of language as something outside of us, something that is this rarified, external thing that we have to master, like the Sphinx’s riddle. But language is an embodied thing. We all carry language in us. It’s very personal. The thing I think I would like everyone to take with them is the knowledge that language isn’t something to wrestle with. This isn’t something that is outside of your ken because it is entirely out of who you are, where you are, what you do, and that includes things like how you see colour, and how you describe colour.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” notebooks and stickers – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog are Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, childlore, and an updates chat for 2026 in which we also take the “Which Character of the IPA are You?” quiz. You can also subscribe to the Lingthusiasm Patreon right now so that you’re first in line to get the True Color Kory Stamper plot twist that we didn’t wanna spoil in this episode, but we did discuss at length with Kory. We’re so excited to share that part with you. You can follow our guest, Kory Stamper, on Instagram @harmless_drudge and on Bluesky @ korystamper.bsky.social. Her first book is called Word By Word. Her new book is called True Color.

Lauren: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or you can leave us a nice review, like this one from Kaliador, who says, “Funny banter between two likable hosts. Perfect for us who are fascinated by language diversity and analysis. Sit back and enjoy!”

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Kory: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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