What is the origin of the names of colors? It seems odd that only the orange ( and maybe the plum?) was named because of it’s color, or were the colors named from the fruit?
I’m reasonably sure the fruit existed before the word did. You might be asking whether the word originally described the color or the fruit. The root words in Persian and Sanskrit referred to the tree/fruit, as best as I can tell from Merriam Webster.
Many colors didn’t get named until surprisingly late in the culture. It’s been speculated that, since ancient and classical languages didn’t have words for, say, orange or purple, our diatant ancestors couldn’t distingish between red and yellow, or between blue and purple. I think it’s the language, not the eyes, that was undeveloped. We’re only just now developing terms of all the shades of off-white.
From here.
And there’s the county of Orange in the South of France, where the ancestors of the Dutch Royal family originate from…hence the name William of Orange, and the Dutch use of orange as our national color in for example, soccer matches.
It is interesting that something can exist, without there being an word for it in the language. For instance, there is a Dutch word for that thing a cat does when he rubs his head and cheeks against you: “kopjes geven” (“giving little heads”) . I’m sure English cats have done this since they became domesticated, and English speakers have been aware of cats doing it, and yet they didn’t have a specific word for it. It’s probably the same with orange. Maybe people called it “sunset-colored” ?
It’s not speculated by anyone who’s done any research, though. In fact, a classic study of colors in different languages showed that, while many languages actually have fewer basic color terms, everyone seems to have the same basic prototypes for their colors, and colors closer to those prototypes are the most psychologically salient, no matter what language you speak.
Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the word pink (color) was coined to describe the color of pink (the plant) blossoms.
on a somewhat philosophical sidenote … its interesting that the color orange was named after the fruit, but for example - yellow was not named after banana (mabe not that wide of a distribution of this fruit) …
also its interesting that in both english, german and spanish the color orange is the same word as the fruit (orange, orange, naranja)
smthg similar seems to apply to the color “olive”
sl2
alfred
“Pink” in relation to the plant describes the jagged edges of the flowers. Hence “pinking shears”. I suppose the name for the colour followed on from there.
Again referencing the study I mentioned earlier, Berlin and Kaye (1969), there appears to be a hierarchy of “basic” color terms - some languages have as few as two basic terms, one meaning black and applying to dark colors and the other meaning white and applying to light colors. Languages with more basic color terms - English has 11 by their criteria - add them in a particular order:
white and black > red > yellow or green > green or yellow > blue
(and languages with more follow them up with purple, grey, brown, orange, and pink and sometimes others in any order.)
What this means is that certain colors are simply far more perceptually salient and important than others, seemingly independent of culture. It’s not surprising, then, that most cultures would have very basic terms for a color like yellow, whereas a much less basic color like orange or pink would be named for an object. It would be relatively surprising for a really basic color term to be very obviously related to an object, since most likely whatever origin the term has has been lost in the mists of antiquity.
Thank you all for your insights. I am still a bit curious about this though. If the fruit came first, and the color orange was named for it or from it, what was the color orange called before the fruit was found, and for that matter, since it was found someplace first, why is it that orange is orange universally? Certainly other cultures had a color orange which they referred to before they knew of the fruit. Were they later told they were wrong??? It seems more reasonable to me that the fruit was named for the color, and that the understanding of what was orange was accepted and passed along until the fruit was found and named. It still seems odd to me that with that level of mentality of naming a food for it’s color, that cherries aren’t reds and lemons aren’t yellows, yet an orange is orange and a plum is plum.
The name “orange” is, of course, not universal. In Mandarin, for instance, it’s “juhongse”. The word is pretty universal in Europe because familiar European languages lacked a word for it until the fruit arrived; as I explained, many languages have fewer words for colors than modern English. It’s only in some places that the Persian word was used for the fruit, which makes sense since Europe didn’t have the fruit until fairly recently. And most of Europe didn’t have words for the color. Which isn’t surprising - most of the basic colors have clear examples in nature, but there are relatively fewer orange things, at least. There’s plenty of green stuff around you; the sky is blue; blood is red. But there aren’t nearly as many examples of good pure orange shades that would have been available at the time. Older texts refer to things that color as red, or yellow, or tawny, or dun, depending on the shade. Since there wasn’t a basic color word for orange, people described the few available orange objects by extending other color words a bit.
The fruit was not named for the color; I’m sorry if that doesn’t make intuitive sense for you, but there’s not actually doubt about the historic origins of the word. You’re taking a small number of examples and generalizing much too far; it’s in a small group of very connected cultures that borrowed the word and color name amongst themselves. It’s a mistake to expect every language to resemble one’s own; while our basic color vocabulary is ample in English - and in most modern languages - this is due to borrowing words or inventing them as examples arose. Just like we don’t have a basic color term for, say, “ecru”, which many people would describe as “white” or “tan”.
Color names tend to be pretty fluid. Just because a culture might not have had a specific word for the color we call “orange” wouldn’t have stopped them from describing orange-colored things, perhaps with words meaning “golden” or “red” or “yellow”. Even cultures that were familiar with the fruit orange might call it by some such name instead of by the word “orange”, as in the case of Greek chrysomelia, “golden apple”.
Etymology doesn’t have a lot to do with what “seems reasonable”. The existing evidence indicates that “orange” and similar words are ultimately derived from Sanskrit “naranga” (itself probably derived from a non-IndoEuropean substrate language), meaning the plant that we know as the orange tree.
But there’s no evidence that foods are named for their colors; that’s just your speculation. What appears to happen is in fact the reverse: colors frequently take their names from foods, such as cherry, plum, peach, orange, salmon, aubergine (for the French), eggshell, etc. etc. etc.
Bunting. 
Really? I all ways call it nudge-bumping.
Didn’t English get a lot of colour-names from the French: beige, puce, mauve, etc?
Exactly.
Not surprisingly, when new names are thought up for colors, objects in general and foods in particular are common sources. Burgundy, claret, cranberry, salmon, tangerine, pumpkin, lemon, chartreuse, lime, mint, grape, bubble gum. For non-foods, pink, purple (well, from a Latin word, itself from the name of a purple dye), violet, indigo, rose (which aside from being a frequent term in English is the basic color term for pink in the Romance languages). Sky blue. Coral. Lavender. Lilac. Putty. Fire-truck red. And look at the range of café drinks used to describe brown skin or hair - I’ve heard of espresso, mocha, café au lait, cappuccino, and latte skin or hair, as well as caramel and chocolate.
It’s more surprisingly that some colors aren’t named for things, really - how else would you name a color? Some of these are mostly used as descriptors of other colors - “pumpkin orange”, “lemon yellow”, “mint green” - but it’s easy to imagine that many of the descriptors are becoming less married to the basic terms they modify. And it’s easy to coin new ones as well - if someone asked me to describe the color of something I saw, there would be no confusion if I said, say, “Pepto-Bismol” or “spinach”.
The only other frequent sources of new color terms that come to mind are borrowings - magenta, fuschia, azure - and a few names of artist pigments that have become fairly common - ochre, umber, maybe cadmium yellow. None of these is individually necessary - it’s easy to describe something that’s umber as “tan”; that’s what you do if you don’t have a convenient color term. That’s what they had to do when they didn’t have a name for orange. But then, before the days of synthetic dyes, there weren’t as many orange things around.
I’ve mentioned this before in threads such as these, but having arisen in England, the English language has historically less use for a name for the colour orange than would many other cultures; there are only two native plants with orange flowers (and one of them is called Scarlet Pimpernel), and there are hardly any orange-coloured native berries. OK, we have orange-coloured sunsets here when there’s a gap in the clouds and when the rain stops for long enough, it’s also possible to light a fire with orange flames, howeve, it’s a simple fact that the majority of speakers of early English simply would not be experiencing a great deal of exposure to the colour, so may not have particularly noticed the lack of a word to precisely describe it.
Nose-wiping, or whisker-cleaning. 
But this illustrates Maastricht’s point that there isn’t one specific recognized term for the phenomenon in English.
Yup, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this happened as part of an influx of French technical vocabulary concerning couture/fashion (although I don’t know exactly when). Considering all the French-derived English terms for fabrics and clothing design, I would bet that most French-derived color words were imported along with them.
Two examples suggest that the range of red was larger and included orange. We talk about redheads, although at best they are carrot colored. And we say that rust is red, although it is clearly orange. And these examples are in the current language, although they are clearly mistaken. But it is at least reasonable to conjecture that once upon a time, red included orange. It certainly was not the case that we didn’t see orange things; we just called them red.
The idea for naming the color after the fruit seems universal though. Afterall, “juhongse”, hyperliterally, means “that reddish color you see on oranges”. Like you say, the Chinese language considers orange as a variant of red.