What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in language because we’re constantly speaking and writing about them. The term “orange” became what it is in English after the fruit made it to the French town Orange. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Original Orange”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Deb, and I’m calling from Chicago.
Actually, I live in Waukegan, but I’m at work, and so I’m calling from Chicago.
You commute from Waukegan to Chicago.
I do.
Well, how can we help you today, Deb?
Well, I wrote to you about which came first, the color orange or the fruit, and I’ve been thinking a lot since how, you know how sometimes a color just really pops up in your life?
Mm—
I mean, this is the year of the color orange.
I mean, I’ve always loved it, and I had sort of orange hair as a kid, but I just noticed it’s a color I’m really gravitating to.
It’s really expressing me.
And also, my husband and I are eating one heck of a lot of oranges.
So I think it’s natural that this question arose.
So which came first, the fruit or the color?
Yeah, because I thought, and I was remembering that in Spanish we say color de naranja, and the one other piece of information I gleaned, I wanted to have a conversation with you guys rather than try to figure it out.
But I was talking to a friend of mine about it, and she thought she was pretty sure that the Moors brought oranges to Spain.
That’s where they first crept into our language.
But again, I still don’t know whether that’s because we already have the color orange.
Yeah, oranges did travel a long, long way.
That’s right, yeah.
Yeah, from East Asia all the way over here.
The original term was in Sanskrit, and it found its way going west through Arabic and Persian and Italian.
And you’re right, it turned into naranja in color de naranja in Spanish.
And eventually it found its way into English.
But you’re right, it’s the fruit that came first.
Long before that, for centuries, it wasn’t as if the color wasn’t there in Old English.
Before that, you would say yellow red or something like that for yellow red.
This fascinating fruit was so striking that within 100 years or so of it first appearing in the West, they started using it as the word for the color, sort of like beet red, I guess.
Yeah, there’s two interesting things here that have always struck me about orange.
The first is that like the parts of the body, colors travel very well in language.
It’s very easy to find the etymology of colors because we are constantly using them.
We are constantly speaking them and writing about them or using them in our writing.
So this is why we know the history of the word orange.
And actually, it’s kind of the reason that we know the history of the fruit orange as well.
The second thing about orange in English, which is really interesting, is once the word appeared in some form in Italian and then entered French.
In France, the name of the fruit became a little confused with a place spelled O-R-A-N-G-E that just coincidentally was very similar to the word.
And so that is where we got the English spelling and a bit of the English pronunciation of orange.
Yeah, there happened to be a lot of oranges coming through the lounge.
Yeah, so it’s just the absolute…
From the east, yeah.
Very much a coincidence.
It’s very interesting.
But what a strong etymological path we have here.
We’ll make sure to put some information about this on the website.
Deb, I’ve got to tell you, this was a great call.
Thank you for calling and asking us about this interesting word.
Oh, thank you very much.
Thanks so much.
I’m glad to know it’s the year of the orange.
Or the year of orange.
Love orange.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
So to sum up, that word orange is fruit forward.
The fruit comes first.
Fruit forward.
You like it?
Forward thinking fruit, like orange.
And can you imagine how exotic that must have been?
Because, you know, you look at some of the Germanic languages like German and Dutch, the term translates as Chinese apple, the term for orange.
Oh, very good.
So even in those languages, it retains a bit of the history of the thing.
Yeah.
I love that.
Yeah, it’s an apple, but it’s from this exotic place to the east.
Word origins, they make us hot.
Or send your questions about those strange histories to words at wewordradio.org.
