why do they call a orange the color orange but the call lemons,lemons when theyre yellow? this confuses me so.

Answer 1

more importantly, why aren't lemons called 'Yellows'?

Answer 2

First I would like to say that some of you who answered this question and insulted the question asker really need to grow up. This section of Yahoo was created to help people, who should be free to ask questions without other people making comments about how stupid they are.

Now, to answer the question. I found this information for you. I hope it helps:

Sweet oranges are relatively recent introductions to the Western world (mid-1400s or early 1500s). The trees were 'created' and domesticated by the cultures of southern and eastern Asia. According to Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (using the Harvard-Kyoto convention transliteration), two of the Sanskrit names for the orange tree are yoga-raGga and nAgaraGga. According to the 1889 Century Unabridged Dictionary, from the Sanskrit came the Hindi, narangi, and the Pali (scholarly language of Theravada Buddhism), narango.

In ancient Persian, it was called the narang and in Arabic, naranj. The Arabic name passed to the Spanish, naranja, and the Portuguese, laranja. In Italy and France, the Arabic name was combined with Latin aurum (the color gold) becoming arancia and auranja, respectively.

Eric Partridge offers an alternate derivation: "the change from naranja to aranja was caused by confusion of the -n of the indefinite article un, un naranja becoming un aranja." (Origins, a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1983, Greenwich House) The English word, orange, did not appear in print until around 1542. Oddly, the color orange appears to have been named for the fruit.

I didn't really find anything that would help with the lemon part of the question. Sorry. I still hope this helped though.

Answer 3

The orange is a hybrid of ancient cultivated origin, possibly between pomelo (Citrus maxima) and tangerine (Citrus reticulata). The word "orange" comes from Sanskrit "narang". Which is true b/c as an East Asian descendant my parents still refer to the color orange or oranges as Naranga. Oranges originated in southeast Asia, in either India, Pakistan, Vietnam or southern China which being a US born and raised citizen I thought it was indigenous to Florida..... yah who would have guessed.

Likewise, there are arguments that the lemon originated in either Malaysia, China, Persia, Asia Minor, or the Indus Valley. The latter wins--archaeological evidence includes a lemon-shaped earring from 2500 BC.

Lemons were being cultivated in Palestine as early as the first century a.d, and perhaps in Greece as well. By the second century, Libya was exporting them to Rome. (There is a mosaic in Pompeii that shows a lemon) However, the fruit was expensive and rarely encountered. However, it is believed that the first lemons were originally cultivated in the hot, semi-arid Deccan Plateau in Central India.

The origin of the name "lemon" is through Persian (لیمو Limu), akin to the Sanskrit nimbuka. They were cultivated in Genoa in the mid-fifteenth century, and appeared in the Azores in 1494.


Both fruits are hybrids and both have been served interchangeably as a gift of gratitude and a token of appreciation by once the wealthy class. So the terms that we know of these fruits in English isn't exactly the literal term but a form of sanskrit. Additionally, the color orange is called so because that color resembled the naranga (orange) fruit just as many colors in a crayola box are also named according to a color of a fruit, flower, or animal.

Hope this helped!

Answer 4

You know it is probably a stupid answer like the guy who first discovered an Orange name was orange and it was probably a new color so he named it orange to. Don't worry about things like that because that is how it happens like America Columbus found it but his best friend name was America

Answer 5

because mr. orange discovered both the color and the citrus, while mr. lemon only discovered the citrus and mr. yellow discovered the color.

Answer 6

You worry too much.
Maybe the color was named after the fruit. Or they just couldn't come up with a better name for the fruit.

Answer 7

well, there are lemons and lemons

many types of lemons are green (dark green)

Answer 8

you must have been confused your whole life...lemon head

Answer 9

have some more lemons

Answer 10

how come they dont call hot dogs "brownish red"? how come they dont call the sun "blinding yellowish-orangeish-white"?