Why did oranges receive the honor of naming such a standard color, as opposed to, say, pumpkins or carrots? It probably has to do with timing. Even in China, the orange’s likely birthplace, the characters for the fruit and the color are the same. But in Europe and beyond, “orange” became both the name for the color and the fruit. “China apple” is still a synonym for orange in a number of languages, including Dutch and Ukrainian. This also coincided with Portuguese sailors bringing a sweeter, tastier orange from China to Europe. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “orange” started to be used in English to describe cloth and clothing in the 16th century. The name for the color came later, though. By the 1300s, the word “orange” and its variants had spread across Europe, and denoted the name for the brightly-colored fruit. A handful of other words did, too: Before a linguistic shift called metanalysis, where the “n” sounds shifted to the indefinite article, an apron once read as a napron and an uncle as a nuncle. While the word stayed close to its original roots in several tongues- naranja in Spanish and arancia in Italian-it lost that first “n” in both French and English. A redhead in an orange dress (and oranges.) Edmond Aman-Jean/Public Domain When Islamic rule spread to southern Italy and Spain in the Middle Ages, the orange tree made it to Europe. Traders traveled with the nāraṅga across the Middle East, and it became the Arabic naaranj. While both red and yellow are terms derived from Proto-Indo-European words, the roots of the word “orange” come from the Sanskrit term for the orange tree: nāraṅga. For example, in ancient China and Japan, a fixed term for blue didn’t exist: Instead, the term was qing, which could refer to either green or blue.īefore orange (the fruit, that is) stormed Europe, yellow-red was called simply that: yellow-red, or even just red. In fact, it was only after the fruit arrived in Europe that Western languages began referring to the shade as “orange.” It’s worth noting that colors are often named how they are because of social constructs.

The color orange got its own name fairly recently, though.

After all, even oranges are colored orange. But calling the blend of red and yellow “orange” doesn’t raise many eyebrows, in elementary school and otherwise. Rudimentary color theory is one of the first things we learn as children, albeit while slopping paint together. Before orange the fruit, was there orange the color? Jacob van Hulsdonck/Public Domain

Different words for orange colour