Immensely likable ... Enthralling ... Excellent ... Stamper’s book is about color, but it’s also a sneakily insightful philosophical treatise on what it means to define anything at all.
A vivid account of the nearly Sisyphean task of compiling a dictionary for a living language ... Ms. Stamper is an engaging guide, and her curiosity about language, science and odd characters animates the book. At times, however, the prose can feel overstuffed, as if mirroring the abundance of the dictionary it celebrates. The narrative wanders through exuberant wordplay and digressions that can become distracting ... Imaginative riffs and historical detours pull the reader well beyond the book’s central thread.
A spiritedly breathless account of the effort to define thousands of different colors ... In writing about the making of dictionaries, Stamper offers the kind of elemental story people crave: a privileged look inside a subculture ... Oddly thrilling ... Shows off her extraordinary chops as a researcher ... Improbably entertaining ... Embodies the essence of its subject: life, like the making of a dictionary, is nothing if not colorful.
Stamper’s sense of humor and flippant lightness of tone — on display throughout the book — belie the earnestness with which she approaches her subject ... By creating a character-based narrative and exploiting its inherent comedy, Stamper lends appeal to what, in the hands of a grim-faced academic, would be a very dry book ... Occasional dreariness notwithstanding, Stamper’s prose and ability to spin a yarn make the history of color definition a fun, accessible story.
A lively examination of both the history of color naming and the meticulous process of producing a comprehensive dictionary ... A fresh, irreverent history of words.
