The average American consumes over 13 pounds of oranges annually, making it making it one of the most popular fresh fruits (and fruit juices) in the U.S. Whether it’s the beautiful hue of a mimosa, or the vibrant color of an orange thrown haphazardly in a lunch bag, Bon Appétit describes it as “the only really edible thing in the English language that describes itself.” But when savoring one of the most luscious and widely enjoyed fruits around, you might find yourself asking a peculiar question: Are oranges named after the color, or was the color inspired by the fruit?
The Origins of the Fruit
The first mention of a naranga tree appears in a first-century CE Indian medical text, according to linguistic analysis and conversation on the podcast “The Allusionist.” This Sanskrit word originally meant “fruit like elephants” — possibly a reference to the tough, dimpled skin of the giant mammal feeling similar to the citrus fruit. The fruit itself, native to northern India, wasn’t originally described as “orange” in appearance, because no word for the color existed yet. The word for the fruit morphed into different variations as it moved through trading routes, including the Persian narang, the Spanish naranja, and the Sicilian arangia.
Attempting to Describe Color
As English developed, people used a variety of words to describe colors that didn’t have their own names yet. Geoluhred, meaning “yellow-red” in Old English, was the 14th-century word for the color we now know as orange, as it didn’t have a unique name at the time.
Dominic Watt, linguistics professor at the University of Leeds, responded to a query from a Guardian reader, who asked the “which came first” question. He points to the apricot and peach to show that the orange is no longer the only fruit with this double meaning.
“A name for a mixture of red and yellow is actually pretty rare cross-linguistically. Presumably English didn't have a basic term for the hue before oranges started to hit the market stalls, though of course that doesn't mean that people couldn't distinguish orange from red, yellow, or any other colour,” Watt explained to the inquisitive reader.
Losing the “N”: An Example of Metanalysis
Along trade routes, the fruit dropped its leading “n” when it moved from naranja to arangia in Sicilian. Articles (such as “the” and “a/an”) in many languages don’t pair easily with words beginning with “n.” The “n” died off by the time English speakers started using it, possibly because it was difficult to tell if the “n” sound was part of the article or part of the “naranja.” This is linguistic metanalysis, meaning “the process by which the division between words or parts of words is changed, results in the creation of a new word (as in the development of ‘an apron’ from ‘a napron’).” Modern Spanish is one of the only languages that still uses the leading “n” in naranja, though it drops it in reference to the color orange, anaranjado.
Orange in Geography and Literature
“Orange” appears in other forms beyond its fruit or color, such as in the Dutch House of Orange and the region in France, possibly inspired by the fruit’s trade journeys. The Saturday Evening Post traced the route through Paris and through an area the Romans named Arausio, then Auranche: “Whether the name of the fruit passing through the area influenced the geographical name or vice versa is unclear; regardless, both came to be called orange in both French and English by the mid-13th century.” So while it may have loosely been inspired by the fruit, it definitely wasn’t named after the color.
The use of “orange” as a color appeared in English literature sometime after the 1390s, when Chaucer described a fox in a Nun’s Priest’s Tale (“whole color was betwixe yellow and reed”), and before Shakespeare’s use of it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which premiered in 1605. He describes an “orange tawny beard,” using it as a modifier rather than a stand-alone color.
Solidifying Orange on the Rainbow
Sir Isaac Newton left orange and indigo out of the original color wheel in the 1660s, but later added them to mirror an octave, as he saw colors and music intrinsically connected. Those additions gave us the definitive authority in color: ROYGBIV. Though many other instances might be named as the birth of the color orange in English, Newton’s endorsement was the (preferably orange-flavored) icing on the cake.
Featured image credit: Androlia/ iStock