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- Lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, ” Truel Color,” was inspired by the wild, poetic color definitions in Webster’s Third Dictionary.
- These unique definitions were crafted by scientists I.H. Godlove and his wife Margaret Godlove.
- The US sought color standards after WWI, leading to a “color boom” and dictionary inclusion.
It was the third definition of “begonia” — describing the color, not the flower — that sent lexicographer Kory Stamper down a Technicolor rabbit hole.
She came across it one day in 2010, while proofreading entries for the online version of Webster’s unabridged Third International Dictionary (a k a the “Third”). The famed 1961 dictionary — a 10-pound, 2,662-paged reference book written for the “nuclear age” — described it as “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.”
“It was utter and complete nonsense,” Stamper writes in her new book, “True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color — from Azure to Zinc Pink” (Knopf). What color was fiesta? Wasn’t sweet william a flower that came in multiple hues? And what made a particular shade of coral “average”?
The ridiculousness of the entry for “begonia” and other colors intrigued and amused her. She decided to investigate who was behind their vivid, unique style.
It turns out that the delightfully daffy definitions were the product of one eccentric scientist and his brilliant, enterprising wife, hired at a time when the United States — and the world in general — was beginning to get serious about chroma.
“Everything we currently know about color,” Stamper states, “could plausibly be traced back to one point in modern history.”
Before the Great War, the US relied largely on Germany — the birthplace of modern chemistry — for its synthetic dyes. When the Americans joined the war effort in 1917, however, they realized that they needed to not only ramp up their dye production, but also create some standards.
“Color, it turns out, was tactical,” writes Stamper. “Thousands and thousands of yards of camouflage covers needed to be dyed a consistent color: Make one batch just a smidge too green, for instance, and that camo cover no longer blends in with the mud of the Somme.”
To complicate matters, everyone seemed to have a different definition of, say, “khaki” or “olive green.” Even within the military, color swatches for different fabrics from different branches of armed forces did not match.
And so the government went to the National Bureau of Standards, created in 1901 as the first national physical sciences research labs. They gave them a new mandate: create some color standards. Scientists were conscripted to study color, and they found myriad ways to take advantage of their expertise.
They worked for photography labs and fashion companies. They launched color consultancies and forecasting firms. They created color guides for textile manufacturers and graphic designers. They wrote books on color matching, color theory and color psychology.
This color boom was just beginning when Merriam-Webster decided to update its New International Dictionary in the 1920s — and include colors.
Merriam-Webster hired outside consultants to provide vocabulary and definitions for its new scientific terms, and color was no exception. However, it proved the trickiest.
There are four main types of color names, Stamper explains: basic colors (your colors of the rainbow, plus black and white and maybe pink); intrinsic colors, which are based on something in real life (like lime, daffodil or cardinal); associative color names, which are tied to a person or place (“Alice blue,” “Prussian blue,” etc.); and finally the fanciful color names that are meant to “evoke a feeling,” like Hush, Mute, Mystery, and Secret. These were sometimes made up by manufacturers and retailers to sell stuff. After all, why market a suit as drab “brown” when you can call it “chocolate” or “espresso”?
Two years after Webster had contracted a scientist to come up with the color terms and definitions for the new volume, it still had nothing. That’s when I.H. Godlove arrived.
Godlove was a scientist and color evangelist — he wanted to spread the gospel of color to the world. He went about his work for Webster’s with uncommon zeal. And when Webster embarked on the Third, he eagerly offered his expertise once again.
He and his wife Margaret — who had studied chemistry at Oberlin and co-wrote a color newsletter with Godlove — got to work. When he died in August 1954, from a ruptured appendix, Margaret continued their work.
The Third, finally released in 1961, two years behind schedule, was a bit of a flop. But Margaret flourished. She had a successful career as a color researcher and scientist and later became a veterinary assistant. When Stamper met her surviving step-grandchildren, they said that the whimsy in that begonia write-up was all her. “I never met I.H.,” one of them told Stamper. “But I saw Margaret in that definition.”
The Godloves’ work shows just how slippery color definitions are. Since the Third came out in 1961, thousands of “new” colors have been invented, or discovered. And many of the Third’s colors have faded away (see: Fiesta).
As much as we’d like to impose a color standard, humans keep interfering. Marketers and designers rechristen hues for marketing purposes, or we mislabel them simply because the small difference between, say, razzmatazz and magenta is too nuanced for the untrained or hurried eye.
Color is in the eye of the beholder: Pantone has its own version of begonia, which is different from Sherwin-Williams’, which is different from Benjamin Moore’s, which is different from Margaret Godloves’.
But Godloves’ whimsical definitions feel true because they get at the way most of us think of color, not as something rigid but as something poetic, playful and vibrant.
