Orange or orange? That is the question!
Have you ever wondered which got named after which, the fruit based on its color or the colod based on the fruit shade?
If you dig a bit into history, you`ll find out that the fruit came before the color.
The word’s roots can be traced all the way back to Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-European language of India. The word “orange” derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as “narange” in the 14th century, gradually losing the initial “n”. This process is called wrong word division and also left us with “apron” (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere).
Oranges are unknown in the wild. They are a hybrid of tangerines and the pomelo or “Chinese grapefruit” (which is pale green or yellow) and were first cultivated in south-east Asia. They weren’t orange, but green, and Vietnamese oranges and Thai tangerines are still bright green on the outside and orange inside.
The linguistic ancestor to today’s word “orange” was actually first used to describe the tree that the fruit grows on. As the word evolved, it eventually came to mean the fruit, not just the orange tree.
The word didn’t come to describe a color until almost 200 years later, making the fruit the clear winner. In 1512, a description of the color using the word “orange” appeared—in a rather strange place. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the word first appeared in…a will.
If orange the color was not a word until 1512, then how did people describe the color? According to the Huffington Post, speakers of Old English used the word geolurēad, meaning “yellow-red.” But thanks to an Old French word, the color orange has a name all its own. And a unique name, at that—”orange” doesn’t rhyme with any other word in English.
The only pure color names are white, red, brown, green, blue and black. Hundreds of other colors come from the name of various things such a material, flowers, fruit etc. A few examples of these colors would be amber, violet, indigo, turquoise.
Source: Reader`s Digest, Telegraph UK, The Guardian
