What came first.. The colour orange or the fruit?

Answer 1

This is an easy one for me to answer, since a quick look at the big Oxford English Dictionary gives the historical details. The fruit definitely came first—it is recorded in English in the fourteenth century, while the application of its name to the colour only appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth. This raises the question of what people called the colour before they had a word for it: either they didn’t (few things in nature are that colour and there was no bright orange pigment available to artists and dyers until the early nineteenth century) or they borrowed terms like yellow, gold, amber, or red to describe various shades.

By the way, the word orange is interesting, etymologically speaking, because it’s an excellent example of a change called metanalysis in which the first letter of a word shifts to the end of the preceding word. So a numpire became an umpire, a napron became an apron, and so on. In Arabic, the fruit was named naranj (from Persian narang and Sanskrit naranga—the orange may have originated in northern India) and this name came with the fruit into Italian and also into Spanish, in which the fruit is still called naranja. The initial letter dropped off before the word reached English, possibly in Italian but more probably in French.

Answer 2

If you mean the words, then "orange" first denoted the fruit and then came to denote the colour of that fruit. The word is of Sanskrit origin. Before the fruit was introduced and named orange, the colour that we today name "orange" had another name.

If you mean, like, the egg and chicken question, I'd have to go with the colour, it was there in sunsets long before any plants developed. :)

Answer 3

It is important to note that the fruit and color share names in languages derived from Latin. So both things have existed for as long as they've existed - the color, since man first perceived light and the fruit, since the first time someone found an orange.

From wikipedia:

"The French shift from arenge to orenge may have been influenced by the French word or (gold) — in reference to the color of oranges — or by the name of Orange, France, a major distribution point of oranges to northern regions. The name of the village did not derive from the word: in Old Provençal, it was known as Aurenja, with the initial sound later shifting (McPhee, 1975) (the original Roman name of the village was Arausio and came from a Celtic water god). The village name and fruit name thus converged coincidentally, one becoming associated with the other."

Answer 4

I would say the fruit came first, then when people saw the colour of it, and saw something the same colour, they called it the colour or the orange, then said, the colour orange, then just orange. Phewww........ I must go to my bed, I'm rambling.
Goodnight/

Answer 5

Well the colour didn't happen until someone decided to call it orange, but arguably the fruit has been under going evolution, but I reckon it was pretty much an orange before someone learned to speak.

Answer 6

The fruit.
Orange derives from Sanskrit nāraṅgaḥ "orange tree", with borrowings through Persian nārang, Arabic nāranj, Spanish naranja, Late Latin arangia, Italian arancia or arancio, and Old French orenge, in chronological order. The first appearance in English dates from the 14th century. The name of the color is derived from the fruit, first appearing in this sense in the 16th century.

Answer 7

The colour is named after the fruit - the name of the colour changed in the 15th-16th century.
The previous word for the colour was "norring" and (I assume) it was the similarity of the word to "orange" that aided in its replacement, also the fruit is one of the main things we find in that colour.

Answer 8

i think the word orange was around before the fruit was introduced. in the english speaking world anyway.

specifically, the term was geoluhread, which transliterates into Modern English variously as yellow-red, yellowred, or yellored.

learn something new every day, i guess.

Answer 9

I would have to say the color orange because sometimes the sun is that color and without the sun there would be no fruit.

Answer 10

In English the fruit, in other languages the two are usually separate.