A father and son are having an ongoing discussion about which came first — the color orange or the name of the fruit? The citrus got there first. The original name of this fruit comes from Sanskrit naranga, or “orange tree.” A German term for “orange,” Apfelsine, literally means “Chinese apple.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Which Came First, the Name of the Fruit “Orange” or the Word for the Color “Orange”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Ignatius, and I’m asking a question on behalf of my son.
Oh, okay. Where are you and your son located?
We are in Pennsylvania.
Oh, okay.
Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Welcome to the show. What is the question that you two have?
Okay, the question was, he asked me several days over dinner, and I kept not answering him, what came first, the color orange or the fruit orange?
Oh.
Oh, good question.
All right.
What’s your son’s name and how old is he?
My son’s name is Siler and he’s eight.
That is a great question.
What came first?
The color orange of the fruit.
All right.
So give us some backstory.
Why did this come up?
I don’t know why that one came up, but we had this long discussion about what might be the roots of that.
And my best guess was I was basing it on I think that the orange is all originates originates from Mandarin oranges in China.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if that were the case, then he and some of my other kids came up with the idea that maybe Marco Polo brought oranges back.
And then they just said, what is it?
And they said, oh, it’s orange.
I don’t know.
And so we’re assuming that the color came first in whatever language, and then it was put to the orange because it was the color orange.
But I don’t know for sure.
Interesting.
Interesting.
So the color orange is named for the fruit.
So we did indeed name the color orange after the fruit, just to clarify.
So that surprises a lot of people.
And then the next question usually is, well, what did we call that color before the fruit came along?
And the answer is we usually lumped it in with yellows or reds when we described it.
Or we compared it to other things.
Like we might say, oh, it’s the color of this or that flower or other things that were approximately like that.
Or, you know, you remember that sunset the other night?
It looked like that.
A white red or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We might say something like that.
We just didn’t give it its own one name.
And you’ll often find that over the millennia that names for colors have changed.
And what we, I say we, meaning humans, have considered the core colors haven’t always been stable.
For example, pink as a color is relatively new.
It’s only centuries old.
They didn’t used to consider pink a canonical color.
So it’s not surprising at all.
Pink was just a tint of red.
That makes sense.
I lived in China for a while, and I always find it fascinating that there are some colors that they will talk about that we don’t really have an exact connection to.
Like, it’s in between two colors, like a blue-green kind of a thing.
It’s interesting that you bring up the China connection because there is a word in German for orange that is Apfelzene, which means Chinese apple.
Oh.
But your theory about the original, original name for the fruit, the orange is originally from southern India.
And it was not originally sweet.
It was bitter.
And the original, original name probably came from a Tamil word meaning fragrant.
More about its smell and the smell of its blossoms.
And then that word became the Sanskrit word.
I’m going to mangle this, but Naranga, meaning orange tree.
And then the Naranga, in turn, became the word for orange in a zillion languages throughout Asia and Europe.
Oh.
So how does it come to English?
It passes from Sanskrit into Persian, into Arabic, into Provencal, which is an early French dialect, into French.
It actually lost the N at the beginning of the word in Provençal, where the article in front of it.
So we would say an apple.
The N moved from the front of the word and attached to the article.
And then it went into French, and then it entered English.
So it lost the N in front of the word before it reached English.
Interesting.
So the short version, the fruit came first.
That’s great. Well, thank you.
Take care and give our best to your son, all right?
Tell him to keep up the questions.
I will.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Call us again.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Ignatius.
All right.
Bye-bye.
