I finally got a new copy of The Straight Dope (two previous copies “disappeared”) and have been happily occupied rereading this legendary tome. On page 344 a somewhat flippant Pete B. asked about the origin of the word orange -specifically, was the fruit named for the color, or the color for the fruit? Mr. Adams supplied a solid, scholarly reply, but left a burning question: what word was used in English to refer to the color orange prior to 1620 (the first known appearance of the word in question)? Was it lumped in as a red or a yellow, or was some other, foreign term used? 
Welcome to the boards, fshepinc. You are to be commended for owning a copy of one of Unca’ Cecil’s books. Wish more people were like you(hint! hint!).
Since this is a question about one of Cecil’s columns, I’ve moved it over to that forum, and am gonna link to the column, something that helps other readers follow the discussion.
What came first, orange or oranges?.
And, since you are a valued guest, soon to become a valued paying member (hint! hint!), you can NOT search the board for previous threads about Cecil’s columns. So, I’ll post some of those threads for you.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=251649&highlight=orange
Those links are great, but the question was never really answered, was it? What say we take another stab at it?
I’ll second “tawny” from one of those other threads and submit “golden” for further consideration.
Thanks for your help. I had no idea this was such a can of worms!
Note that there needn’t have been a separate word, orange was merely a shade of red. Today, we have lots of words to distinguish many colors (crimson vs scarlet, say) but in olden days, there wasn’t the need to differentiate colors by name.
See what else Cecil had to say about vocabularies for colors: Could early man only see three colors?
“Tenné” was used in heraldry.
“Tan”.
“Red” (for hair).
And sometimes simply “yellow”.