Wait. What? So, what did people in England call orange things before then? Perhaps, that’s just the earliest recorded usage. But still, can we possibly know where basic adjectives – red, orange, big, little, and others came from? I mean, yikes, 1620? Really? I guess nothing orange appears in Beowulf, or the Canterbury Tales, but, wow, no earlier cookbooks, or lists of foodstuffs, crops gathered, etc. needed the word “orange?”
Are you serious? Color adjectives can be broad or narrow, depending on how many color adjectives are available in the lexicon. These even applies at the personal level–eg., you’re probably not familiar with the color aureolin. That doesn’t mean that you stare at aureolin-colored things and don’t know what to call them–you just call them ‘yellow’. Likewise, before the color term ‘orange’ migrated to English, English speakers probably called those things ‘red’ or ‘yellow’, or ‘yellowish-red’, or some other equivalent, depending on the exact shade and what color terms they did have available …
Ahh … I see, maybe that’s why nothing in English rhymes with “orange”, it was totally adopted, 'around the 1600’s, from Continental terms, for a certain fruit, and then spred to describe the color of pumpkins, and other fruits. There must have been some, other, “yellowish-red” Old English word, that I just never heard of. Well, ignorance fought.
“Red” (we still say “red hair” to this day), “ginger” (still used for human hair and cats in the UK), “yellow” (if “red” seemed too far off), and “tenné” (in heraldry) were all in use. “Yellow-red” would be more natural than “yellowish-red”, though I can’t offhand think of an example of either.
More generally, when this subject comes up, this Wikipedia article provides a basic introduction.
When did Saffronbecome popular? That’s kind of orange, and I would think it would crop up, at least in the upper classes when the spice trade was in full swing.
Just to clarify–that’s not necessarily the case. It’s important to keep in mind that we modern English speakers see orange as a color because we have a word for it–someone who speaks a language that doesn’t have an equivalent color word will look at the colors that we think of as shades of orange and probaby see them as different shades of red and yellow.
That Wikipedia article that John W. Kennedy links to has some good examples to help wrap your head around this concept. For example, if you ask an English speaker what basic color this text and this text are, they’ll say (as the BBCode coding does) that they’re both blue–one’s just dark blue and one’s light blue. But a Russian will describe them as two distinct colors, sinii and goluboi. A Russian (or an Italian, as their language also has basic color terms that distinguish these shades) might be as puzzled at our lack as you are at the possibility of the lack of a term for orange in another language. But it’s nothing complicated–the reality is the palette of visible colors, and the words are more or less arbitrary ways of dividing up that infinitely continuous palette of shades into color groups. Because the word orange was taught to you in kindergarten, it seems to you like a distinct ‘type of thing’ in the world–but if you’d been taught a different language growing up, you really wouldn’t see ‘orange things’ as a separate category. You’d just see different shades of red and yellow, with some fuzzy space between where the distinctions are arbitrary. (And which adding an ‘orange’ term wouldn’t remove, but multiply–now there are things on the fuzzy border between red and orange, and others on that fuzzy border between orange and yellow.)
What’s most amazing, once you understand all this, is (as is also mentioned in that article) that these arbitrary divisions of the color palette are actually pretty much language-independent. That is, any language with at least eleven basic color word has a word that is not only best translated to English as ‘orange’, but which really seems to mean ‘orange’. For example, supposing this language’s term ‘rellow’ is seen to refer to some items between red and yellow on the color palette; then, presenting native speakers with items that an English speaker would call ‘orange’ will result in them calling them ‘rellow’ to about the same extent that English speakers would agree that the items were orange rather than red or yellow. There aren’t any known languages where there’s only a rough equivalent–where that language’s ‘orange’ term is generally used to describe things that are yellower or redder than the things English speakers describe as orange. Nobody really knows why this is; but it does contribute to the natural feeling you have that orangeness is just a fact about a thing …
Grass is traditionally “blue” in Welsh, although that is fading under English influence.
Few languages have a word for “pink”.
And, just to make it all harder, some people (mostly women) have four types of cone, and consequently can see colors that the rest of us can’t – and, on the other hand, to them, all color photography, silver or silicon, looks horribly wrong.
English originally used tawny for a large part of the colour we now refer to as orange. Other shades of orange would have been considered to be a dark yellow, or even a light brown.
I’m surprised Cecil was addressing the color orange and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to show off the depth of his knowledge by mentioning what it has in common with purple and silver.
I wish Cecil would edit this column and write the proper french name for orange, which is also orange and not arange.
And don’t bother translating raisin, kiwi, plantain, tangerine, nectarine, lime … or “fruit”
There’s no doubt that Cecil could update this column–the wealth of information available today is superior to what he knew in 1975.
You want Cecil to use the modern spelling of the older Old French word. While it’s orange today, in the 1300s and before it was orenge. This in reference to the Seville (or bitter) orange, the fruit, not the color.
To add, the French almost certainly got the word from the Italians. Who got it from the Arabs and Persians.
For what it’s worth, the term to mean a color, in English, is now cited in print by the OED back to 1557