Mid-Week Mini: Which Came First? The Color or the Fruit?

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we find out the answer to the question: Which came first? Orange the color? Or Orange the fruit?

If you had to guess which came first – the word for the color orange, or the fruit orange – what would you say?

It feels like a trick question, but for most of human history, there actually was no word for the color orange.

Before the fruit showed up in Europe, English speakers didn’t say “orange” at all. Instead, they described that color in ways that feel… a little clunky today. Think “yellow-red” or even just lumping it in with red. In fact, in Old English texts, things we would absolutely call orange today – like certain sunsets or marigolds – were often just described as red.

Then along came the fruit.

The word “orange” traces back through a long linguistic journey. It started with the Sanskrit word nāraṅga, which became nāranj in Persian, then naranja in Spanish. As it moved into Old French- people started dropping the “n” sound at the beginning. So “une narange” became “une arange”… and eventually just “orange.”

By the time the fruit made its way into England around the 14th century, it brought its name with it.

With this, people started using the name of the fruit to describe the color. Not the other way around. The color orange was literally named after the orange.

In fact, the first recorded use of “orange” as a color in English didn’t show up until the early 1500s. Before that, the color existed, obviously… but it didn’t have its own standalone name.

And here’s a fun side note – this is why we don’t have many naturally “orange” things with names that predate the fruit. Carrots, for example, weren’t always orange. Early cultivated carrots were purple or white. The orange ones were selectively bred later, possibly by Dutch growers, and only then did they conveniently match the name we already had.

So, which came first?

Not the color.

The fruit came first – and then we looked at it and said, “You know what… let’s just call that color this.”

The internet says it’s true.