Orange: Colour or Fruit?

Dedicated, long-time readers of this column will no doubt remember that in April 2011 I explained that, lexicographically at least, there is no debate that the egg preceded the chicken. “Egg” arrived in the English language in the ninth century, whereas “chicken” only made its debut a century later. Today I will address the equally weighty conundrum of whether the colour orange or the fruit orange deserves first honours.

I posed this question to 15 friends, and 80 per cent (12 out of 15) believed the colour came before the fruit. Several people based their answer on the idea that the colour term is used more often than the fruit term. Although the colour is common in our vocabulary, this is only a recent phenomenon. In their 1969 book Basic Color Terms, authors Brent Beslin and Paul Kay show how virtually all languages possess a colour sequence that begins with words for black and white (or light and dark), then continues to red, then green and yellow, then blue, then brown and eventually to grey, orange, pink and purple.

Whereas the earliest citation of orange the fruit is from the beginning of the 15th century, the colour orange only appears more than a hundred years later. Actually, there was no word for the colour orange in Old English and a castle decorator would have had to say geolu-read (“yellow-red”) to describe a throne that was orange-coloured.

The fruit orange has enjoyed an exotic etymological odyssey over the millennia. Around 2,500 years ago, the orange made a trip to India from southern China. A Sanskrit medical text describes the narangah, valued for its curative powers. It was a bitter orange, often now referred to as a Seville orange, and the word probably derives from one of the Dravidian languages of southern India, such as Malayalam or Tamil, where the term naru meant “fragrant.”

Its journey, however, had just begun. From India it travelled to Persia, where it was rendered as narang, and to Arabia, where it was called naranj. In the Middle Ages, Muslim merchants brought this bitter type of orange to Sicily and before long it was available throughout Europe. The sweet variety (sometimes called a China orange) that we associate with this fruit reached Europe 50 years later when Portuguese sailors imported it from India. Sweet oranges were considered a luxury and, until the middle of the 19th century, a delight enjoyed by mostly the aristocracy.

The Arabic word naranj was swallowed almost whole in several European languages (e.g., Byzantine Greek nerantzion, Italian narancia and Spanish naranja). But the first letter “n” is often changed or removed entirely as in the Portuguese laranja, the Italian arancia or the late Latin aurantium. The loss of “n” may have occurred as part of a linguistic process called “rebracketing” that gave us English words uncle (from nuncle) and apron (from napron).

When preceded by an indefinite article such as “a” or “an” in English, or une or uno in Romance languages, the “n” can disappear. The opposite can also occur: an “n” can be added to a word. For example, a “newt” was originally in Middle English rendered as “an eute” and a “nickname” was “an eke name.” The Latin aurantium referenced before was probably also influenced by the word aurum, “gold,” since the fruit had a golden colour.

Although we see a progression towards the spelling of “orange” in both English and French, this form of the word is due to a coincidence. In the south of France, there once was a Roman city named Arausio. The influence of Provençal, a dialect of the Romance language Occitan, morphed the city’s name into Aurenja. And it just so happened that Aurenja was becoming a centre of the orange trade. Because the word Aurenja was nearly identical to the Provençal fruit word auranja, it was a small step to orenge and finally orange for both the city and the fruit.

And orange (or should I say Orange) was not finished with its frequent travelling. In the 16th century, Philibert de Chalon of Orange was awarded a good chunk of the Netherlands by Emperor Charles V. When de Chalon died, his title passed to his German nephew, William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who established the Dutch Republic and the House of Orange. As William organized Protestants in Holland to struggle against Catholic Spain for independence, both the name and the colour became associated with the Netherlands.

In a couple of generations, however, orangeness would travel once again. William’s grandson William III became King of England in the late 17th century. Because he defended the Protestant population of Ireland, Protestants there became known as the Orangemen in his honour.

Incidentally, an orange’s colour has nothing to do with its ripeness. Oranges turn orange only as a result of cold weather, which breaks down a membrane protecting their green chlorophyll.