Which came first, orange the colour or the fruit?
The fruit, by a comfortable margin. English named the fruit first and borrowed the colour from it later, which is why so many orange things are still, stubbornly, called red.
The fruit came first, and it is not close. English had the word orange for the fruit for well over a century before anyone used it for the colour, and before that the language had no proper name for the colour at all. When we finally needed one, we reached for the fruit.
The fruit’s long road
The orange travelled almost as far as a word can. It began in Sanskrit as nāraṅga, “orange tree,” and made its way west by trade: into Persian as nārang, into Arabic as nāranj, onward into Italian and Spanish, and at last into Old French, where a pomme d’orenge reached English in the fourteenth century. Somewhere along that journey it lost its first letter, in the way English words tend to shed an n onto the little word in front: a norange quietly became an orange.
A colour with no name
Here is the strange part. Before the fruit arrived, English simply had no word for the colour orange. It made do. Old English called the shade geoluread, “yellow-red,” or folded it into red or yellow and left it there. The colour sense of orange does not appear until the 1500s, borrowed wholesale from the fruit that had finally given the shade a name of its own.
The reds that are really orange
This is where the gap left its fossils. Almost every orange thing that English named before it had the word is still, to this day, called red. A robin has an orange breast, but it is a redbreast. The red fox, the red squirrel, and the red deer are all nearer to orange. People with orange hair are redheads, or ginger, but never orange-haired. Each of these is a small time capsule from the centuries when the brightest word English had for that colour was simply red.
So the fruit named the colour, and not the other way around, and a whole quiet menagerie of orange creatures is still wandering about wearing the older label. Once you have noticed it, you will never look at a robin quite the same way again.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.