What did we call orange before oranges?
Category:
food and drink
non alcoholic beverages
Before orange (the fruit) made its way from China to Europe, yellow-red was called simply that: yellow-red, or even just red. The English word 'orange', to describe the colour, ultimately comes from the Sanskrit term for the orange tree: nāra?ga.
Subsequently, one may also ask, what was the color orange called before oranges?
Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red”.
In this way, why is an orange called an orange?
In English, the colour orange is named after the appearance of the ripe orange fruit. The word comes from the Old French orange, from the old term for the fruit, pomme d'orange. The French word, in turn, comes from the Italian arancia, based on Arabic nāranj (?????), derived from the Sanskrit nāra?ga (??????).
The earliest recorded use of the word in English is from the 13th century and referred to the fruit. The first recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor.