Orange the fruit vs. Orange the colour

I’m gonna let you finish your coffee, but orange juice is the best drink of all time. However, when picking out a good orange juice you must make sure you don’t accidentally get an orange drink. Orange juice, available in all finer refrigerators, comes from orange the fruit. Orange drink, available at all low-budget community events, comes from orange the colour. You can taste the difference.

Orange the fruit originates from Persia (modern day Iran) and was growing in Italy around the 11th century. Apparently these Persian oranges were rather bitter. I would guess somewhat similar to a grapefruit. (a breakfast choice that has always boggled me… clearly inferior to the orange) The sweet oranges that are common today originated in India and quickly became the orange of choice when they made it to Europe in the 1400s. The seeds traveled with Columbus across the ocean in 1493 and eventually made it to Florida in 1513.

It was about the same time that the fruit had traversed the globe that orange the colour came into being… or at least came to be named such. Before it was so dubbed orange in 1512, in the court of King Henry VIII (the one with the catchy theme song), the colour was known in English as geoluhread. That is to say, yellow-red.

If not for the slurring of words, we may have been calling it the Norange. The name of the fruit can be traced back to the sanskrit word naranga. It was naranj in Arabic, narancia in Italy, and norenge in French. When saying something like “une norenge”  the n sounds would run together and over time the leading n fell off the word. (It happens. Another example would be an apron, which in olde English was a napron)

• Source: Orange – Online Etymology Dictionary

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