Here's something that broke our brains a little this week. The fruit called an orange was named long before English had a word for the color orange. If you lived in England in the year 1200 and pointed at a traffic cone, you wouldn't have called it orange. You would have called it red-yellow. Or just yellow. Possibly saffron if you were feeling fancy.
The word orange traveled a long road to get to English. It started as the Sanskrit naranga, moved through Persian as narang, picked up an Arabic version naranj, became naranja in Spanish, then pomme d'orenge in Old French. By the time it landed in English around the 1300s, it was attached to the fruit that traders were bringing up from the Mediterranean. The color didn't get its own name in English until the 1500s, roughly 200 years later, when the fruit became common enough that people started saying things like "that cloth is the color of an orange." Before that, English speakers mostly lumped the shade in with red. Robin redbreasts? Those birds are orange. Red hair? Also orange. The language just hadn't caught up yet.
Linguists have a whole field around which color words show up in which languages, and in what order. Pretty much every language starts with words for light and dark, then adds red, then yellow and green, then blue, and orange and pink show up near the end of the list. Russian has two separate words for light blue and dark blue, and Russian speakers can actually distinguish those shades faster than English speakers can. Japanese used the same word for green and blue for a long time, which is why Japanese traffic lights use a shade of green that's noticeably bluer than the ones in other countries. The lights are technically called ao, the old word for blue, so they picked a green close enough to blue to make the word still fit.
Carrots were purple until the 1500s, so this didn't come up much. The orange carrot we know today was bred by Dutch farmers, probably in honor of William of Orange, around the same time English was finally getting comfortable with orange as a color word. The timing is almost suspicious. A fruit, a prince, a vegetable, and a new word all converging in a couple hundred years. Before the orange carrot became standard, carrots were white, yellow, red, or that deep purple color that's now sold at farmers markets as a trendy heirloom variety. The heirloom is actually the original. The orange one is the newcomer.
If you've got a weird-etymology favorite we should chase down next Friday, send it our way. We're always collecting these.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
