Okay, so if “The first English use of the word “orange” as a color adjective appears to have been in 1620,” then how did english-speaking people refer to the color orange before that time?
“Red,” “yellow,” or “reddish yellow.”
This topic has been addressed here:
Pale Red?
In short:
possibly nothing, except ‘jaundiced pomegranate’
It is not uncommon for some languages to lack terms for one or more of the six colors on the primary color wheel.
Most European languages do not have a word for the color unrelated to the fruit.
Or sometimes by technical words, such as “tenné” in heraldry.
Most languages don’t have a word for “pink”.
Russian has two colors where we have only “blue”.
Welsh has two colors where we have “blue”, “green”, and “brown” (although this is changing under English influence).
And, no, it’s not because different peoples have different color senses.
See Cecil’s Could early man only see three colors? and this thread.
Facinating. Interesting notions all. It IS difficult for me to accept that english speakers would look at a rainbow (which would occur with amazing frequency in rainy old england, I believe) and not have names for each of the colors in it. Perhaps they called it saffron, rust, ‘jaundiced pomegranate’, or many of the other suggestions. I’m not above believing that there was no name for it, it just seems unlikely. However, what life was like before 1620 is anyone’s guess I suppose.
You don’t have to guess. There are languages today that have no word for “orange”. Some of them have no word for “blue”, or “green”, or “yellow”, or “red”, either.
I forgot that important point. It’s always facinating when my ethnocentric perspective rears it’s head. Seriously, when someone who doesn’t have a word for orange sees a rainbow, doesn’t it strike them as odd that some of the colors don’t have their own name? I guess not. Do they perhaps call it “orange” using the english word? Or really, just yellowish-red or somesuch satisfies them? I can understand mauve and such, but it seems to basic! Maybe its because as an American, colors were one of the first things I was taught. Perhaps we place a higher value on color as a society?
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we call “Chocolate brown” and “light brown” by the same name, even though they’re very different?
And as for rainbows, there’s a post that can be searched for explaining that some cultures see 6 colours, and some 7.
It gets worse. No human culture has a word for each color of the rainbow, nor even all human cultures combined. A rainbow does not have discrete bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. In fact, it’s a continuum of colors, with every gradation represented. So red is in there, and so is orange, and a color midway between red and orange, and a color a quarter of the way from red to orange, and a color a tenth of the way from red to orange, and a color a millionth of the way from red to orange. Since there are an infinite number of colors but only a finite number of words, it’s clear that most colors of the rainbow don’t have a name.
While it is true that the degree of differance between red and orange, or orange and yellow, is no greater than the difference between, say, saffron and lemon, and most people get along fine without using either of those commonly, it does seem an odd omission to the modern mind.