Orange

Orange is unusual among colour words in that it is named after an object rather than the reverse: the fruit reached Europe from Asia, its name travelling through Persian and Arabic to the Old French orenge, and English had no distinct word for the hue before it, calling such tones yellow-red or, in Old English, geoluread.

As a symbol orange sits between the warmth of red and the brightness of yellow and carries a mixed sense of energy, warmth and enthusiasm. Its strongest religious association is with Hinduism and Buddhism, where saffron or ochre robes mark the renunciant and the monk; the colour there is tied to fire, to sacrifice and to the ascetic's renunciation, and saffron has become a political as well as a devotional emblem in modern India. In the modern chakra system orange is assigned to the sacral centre, a recent Western placement. In the West it more often carries secular associations, autumn, harvest, and the high-visibility safety orange of the twentieth century, than any liturgical meaning.

Orange is the clearest case in the palette of a colour that existed long before it had a name of its own in English.

The pigments were available from antiquity. Realgar and orpiment, both arsenic sulphides, give strong orange and orange-yellow and were used from Egypt to China, at real cost to the people who ground them. Red lead, minium, sits between red and orange and was the standard cheap warm pigment of the medieval scriptorium; the word miniature comes from it, by way of the small pictures painted in that colour rather than from any sense of smallness.

What was missing was the word. English called the hue geoluread, yellow-red, and the term orange entered the language with the fruit, which travelled from South and East Asia through Persian narang and Arabic naranj into the Romance languages and then into English in the late Middle Ages. The colour name follows the fruit by a considerable interval, which is why an English text before roughly the sixteenth century describing something orange will not use the word.

That sequence is the standard illustration of a finding in colour linguistics: basic colour terms enter languages in a constrained order, and orange arrives late, after the terms for black, white, red, green, yellow, blue and brown are already in place. The colour was seen, painted and worn throughout. It simply had to be described as a kind of red or a kind of yellow until the fruit supplied a noun.