It’s been said that there are two words in English for which there are no perfect rhymes. One of them is month, but this month I’d like to have a look at the other one: orange. Orange is the etymological equivalent of the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the fruit or the colour?
As with so many word origins, the place to start is one of the earliest Indo-European languages, Sanskrit. The orange seems to have originated in south-east Asia, in northern India. The Sanskrit word for this bitter orange was naranga or nraga. In Arabic, this became naranj. As this Persian orange spread west, so did the name, which still survives in recognisable form as the name for modern sweet oranges in many languages, including Albanian (nerënxë), Hungarian (narancs) and Spanish (naranja). In Modern Greek, the name νεράντζι, from the same root, still refers to the bitter orange.
The fruit was introduced into Italy in the 11th century, where it was known in Old Italian as narancia, leading to the Old French word narange. Now imagine saying une narange. The n’s tend to run into each other. Add to that the fact that there was already a town in France called Orenge or Orange and then throw into the mix the French word or (gold), and it’s easy to see how the word became une orange in Old French and then an orange in English.
Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges from China in the 15th century and these quickly displaced the bitter varieties. In most countries, the name remained the same, or they became known as ‘China’ oranges, but a few languages adopted terms that preserved the role of the Portuguese (Bulgarian portukal, Greek πορτοκάλι, Turkish portakal).
We no longer use the term China oranges in English, but a similar fruit has retained the association with that country. Mandarin (Sanskrit mantrin, counsellor)is a term used for Chinese officials, who traditionally wore bright yellow silk robes, perhaps leading to its being used for the similarly brightly-coloured fruit.
And to answer the chicken and the egg question, the first recorded use of orange (actually, orenge) to refer to the fruit that the compilers of the OED could find dates from 1387. The first use of it to refer to the colour dates from 1542.
