What was orange originally called

Still I sat in my home on the range watching the grass grow and eating an orange There you go. Aswathirazak February 10, am. Sadiq June 2, pm. Of course range rhymes with orange. Do you actually know the meaning of the word rhyme? Guybrush Threepwood, a mighty pirate July 13, am.

Door hinge? Keeto January 8, pm. Tongli Best South Boutique Inn. JM Veggie Friends Home. Yangshuo Serene Cove Hotel. Kinmen redbrick houses across Hope. Nordic Memory in Tsingtao. The St. Regis Zhuhai. Tianjin Qingwangfu Boutique Hotel. Show More. Cookies Policy We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. The fruit came first. The English word "orange" has made quite a journey to get here.

The fruit originally came from China — the German word Apfelsine and the Dutch sinaasappel Chinese apple reflect this — but our word ultimately comes from the Old Persian "narang".

Early Persian emperors collected exotic trees for their landscape gardens, which may well have included orange trees. Arabs later traded the fruit and spread the word all the way to Moorish Spain; the Spanish word for orange is "naranja".

In Old French, the fruit became "orenge" and this was adopted into Middle English, eventually becoming our orange, fruit as well as colour. As the instance of " pume orenge " in a 13th-century Anglo-Norman manuscript indicates, orange was in fact first used as an adjective.

Yet, the Persian word from which "orange" is derived did not refer to the colour of the fruit, but to the bitterness of its skin. Orange as a colour adjective dates from the early 16th century; therefore we can say that the orange is called orange because it is orange, as well as orange is orange because of the orange. There are very few pure colour names like black, white, red, blue, green or brown; most of the hundreds of words we use for colours come from things such as fruit, flowers, precious stones and other objects, eg cerise, turquoise, indigo, violet, amber.

Witness a recent Simon Hoggart's sketch Guardian, March 19 : "His [Sir Hayden Phillips's] face, normally the colour of terracotta, went through plum tomato, to brick red and on to tomato. Did this really happen? Award-winning novelist Rosemary Sutcliff's story is of a young Roman who goes on a quest with his slave Esca to discover the fate of his father's lost ninth legion, restore his father's reputation, and retrieve the lost eagle.

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