Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william. What in the world does bluer than fiesta mean? Chasing that question, she found the people behind it. Irwin Priest, a physicist working in the brand-new field of measuring color, took the job for the second edition. Then Isaac Godlove, who spent a career trying to nail down a language for something the eye never quite agrees on, and after he died, his widow Margaret and the color scientist Dorothy Nickerson finished the work. Webster’s Third came out in 1961, got savaged, and was never replaced, so those definitions are still the ones we use. Along the way, you learn that puke was once a fashionable shade of reddish brown. It’s a book about color, and underneath that it’s about what happens when people try to force a slippery thing into a fixed system.