FOOD TRIVIA: The Fruit That Named a Color

 

The linguistic precursor to the name “orange” the fruit was originally used to describe the tree the fruit grew upon. The root for the word refers to the Sanskrit language where the word "Naranga” meant orange tree. The Sanskrit word evolved into the Persian, “narang” and The Arabic word “naran". When Islamic rule spread to Italy and Spain in the Middle Ages, the orange tree made its way to Europe where, to this day, the word stayed true to its original roots in some countries; naranja in Spanish and aranchia in Italian. However, it lost the first “n” in France and England. In France, the Olde French adapted the Arabic word “naranj”as “pomme d’orenge” (the fruit of the orange tree) or just “orenge. The Middle English equivalent became “pume orange’.   By the 13^th century, the word orange began to be used not only for the tree and its fruit but the fruit itself. The name orange as the color, did not come until later, in the 16^th century,  when the term orange (the color of the fruit) began to be used by the English to describe cloth and clothing in that color. Until then, speakers of Olde English used the word “geoluread” (yellow- red) to describe the color that we now know as orange. After that, in Europe and beyond, “orange “became the name for both the fruit of the orange tree and the color of anything whose color matched the color of that fruit.