So, whaqt was the color orange called in Enlish before 1620?
That was addressed in the column the OP was in response to; it’s on the SD Main Page.
Oops, I didn’t realize that was the link; but I did not see in the column what word was used for the color before ‘orange’.
I had the same question.
AHD4, OTOH, says that the word orange came into English in 1380.
It is absolutely possible (and I think I vaguely remember something to that effect) that they used no word at all.
This is a column on a slightly different question that contains many things relevant here:
Thank you.
So does the OED. What Cecil said was that orange as an adjective didn’t come into use until 1620.
So we went about 240 years with the word before we attached it to the color. Personally I like the answer that Bookkeeper came up with in the Pale Red thread:
In heraldry (the formalized rules of which predate “orange” as a colour) orange is named “tenné”, an Old French word equivalent to “tawny” in English. Given that natural source colours and dyes of the period would be more of a muted yellow/brown than the bright orange we are familiar with, I would say that **tawny ** was used for most or all colours we would now call orange.
Wow, my first simulpost!
Thank you again.
I found the details about having words for yellow and green just fascinating.
What shocked me was that anyone would think that a language lacking a specific word for a color could mean that a people could not distinguish that color.