This book is one for the combination word nerds and historians. I learned quite a few interesting facts to whip out during the right conversations. I had no idea where some of our most used phrases came from!

Words from the White House is all about words and phrases that are made popular by or were created by Presidents!  There is a section on firsts- Jefferson the first to wear long trousers and George HW Bush the first to publicly refuse Broccoli.  Madison came up with the term "squatter", Wilson dropped the "The" before "Congress".  There's also an A-Z list of all the words and it is interesting to see where they began to gain popularity (or existence) and how many are still used today!

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* Pretty interesting little book lol learned a lot of things I didn't know about both words and just little facts, I know my dad would love this lol

I'm a logophile, so this kind of book appeals to me. I love etymology and often find myself looking up the histories of words and phrases. I guess I just didn't realize before how many words and phrases were actually coined by US Presidents. So this book also gives you some history lessons as well as the background of some of your favorite terms. It has been updated from the original version to allow for the foibles and new words coined by the current occupant of the White House, and I am guessing to correct any previous errors.

It isn't necessarily the kind of book you are going to sit down and read from cover to cover in an evening. Instead, you'll digest parts of it here and there, making it a great book to have on the coffee table (or yes, even bathroom reading). I found myself hoping to memorize some of the stories in the event they pop up in a trivia game or something like that. I did actually recognize a couple of facts from recent trivia nights.

Being a lover of words and history, I think I would have enjoyed this book even as a kid. I think it can appeal to all ages.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me a review copy. I was not obligated to leave a positive review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Dickson has a compiled a dictionary of words that presidents or other people in their administration have made famous. I was surprised that "founding fathers" was popularized by Harding I thought it was around much earlier. I also did not know that "sugar coated" was first said by Lincoln. You will definitely learned something new from reading this book.

So entertaining so much fun to read through see the words that presidents spoke.I felt we were getting a personal close up lok at them .A book I will suggest to all the lovers of presidential trivia.#netgalley#doverpress

If you are a word nerd who loves presidential trivia, this book is going to be a delight for you. It begins with a little history followed by a list of presidential "firsts" that should whet your appetite. After that, it goes into an A to Z presidential lexicon of words, phrases and slogans. I read this cover to cover so that I could give a full review, but that may not be the way it is best utilized. The layout is alphabetical, so it's natural to come across a nugget that is especially interesting (for me, usually associated with Theodore Roosevelt), followed by a few other entries that may be less appealing or too self-evident to really keep the reader turning pages.

My ideal use of this book would be to have it on a shelf and flip through it casually. I found the real standout wordsmiths to be Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. I appreciated reading about their neologisms, and it makes me more interested in pursuing more in-depth biographies for them.

The original publication of the book was during the Obama administration, so there is a forward in the Dover edition published in 2020 that explains this and mentions a couple of Trump terms (I think "covfefe" is a real elephant-in-the-room, so to speak, for a book released in 2020 about presidents creating new words), but other than the preface to the Dover edition there are no words beyond the first Obama administration that appear in the A-Z entries.

More dictionary than narrative, Words from the White House by Paul Dickinson defines and contextualizes words coined by those in and around the White House. It's a novel reference for flip through, but the stories aren't long or detailed enough for an interested reader to really dig their teeth into. For those who are linguistics fanatics or presidential history buffs, this book is sure to make for a fun edition to their shelves. For more casual readers, it's ten minutes of fun before being set side.