Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I am here with Corey 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.

Corey Stamper, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thanks so much for having me, Minion.

I'm so delighted to see you.

So, you know, I think I remember the original blog post where you just stumbled across

these definitions.

Can you explain for people how you started down this path?

Yeah, absolutely. So for those

who don't know, I used to be an editor at Miriam 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 definitions shaped, but just had this really fascinating and unique voice. And

they made no sense. They did. They were. 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 go chasing color names through

the dictionary. And that started me down this path of who wrote

these? Why are these 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,

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