Word of the Moment: Orange

In this installment of the Word of the Moment, we explore the etymology of the color term orange, a word which always reminds me of my friend Big Tex. When I lived in Portland years ago, I often frequented Powell's City of Books on Burnside. The largest used book store west of the Mississippi, each room is painted a different color to help customers navigate. Foreign Languages? Go to the Red Room. Children's Books? Rose Room.

A couple friends and I were on our way to Powell's one day when we ran into Big Tex. He had been engaging in some amateur outer-space exploration and was looking for something to do. We invited him along, not thinking anything of it when we were separated shortly after entering the store. Knowing where we would have gone, Big Tex walked up to the help desk and asked: "Excuse me. Where are your ethnobotany books?" In a voice that must have reverberated across several cosmic frequencies, the clerk answered him: "ORANGE." If I recall correctly, we found him wandering around the coffee shop twenty minutes later.

Big Tex was justifiably overwhelmed, as this fruit has not only found its way to our supermarkets, but also lent its name to anything that shares the color of its skin. But, if the word came to English from the French around the year 1300, what did we called orange things before then?

A citrus hybrid originating somewhere in Asia's warm and wet parts, the orange (fruit) traveled west by hopping from mouth to mouth.  It entered Northern India as the Sanskrit "nāraṅga" or "nāraṅgaḥ" possibly from another, unrelated Indian language.  In any case, the Persians passed the word "nārang" to the Arabs, who pronounced it as "nāranj."  Although the Spainish would inherit the word as "la naranja," the Italians would lose the first letter before passing it on to the French as an "arancia" (ah-ron-chee-ah).

Now the French may have done some fiddling with the word at this point.  Possibly, they were influenced by the coincidentally named Principality of Orange, which was near Italy in the south of France.  Some also believe that the golden hue of the fruit may have pushed the pronunciation closer to the French word for "gold."  In any case, since most the rich folk in England were speaking French anyway, the word "orenge" hopped the Channel around the year 1300, changing its first syllable from (aw'-ranj) to (or'-anj).

Of course, the Italians weren't the only people peddling this globe trotting fruit.  By the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had become a major naval power.  Having split the New World with the Spanish through the mediation of the Pope and the Treaty of Demarcation, Portuguese traders continued Christopher Columbus' quest for the riches of the East, establishing trade with India, Japan and China.  From the last, they obtained the Sweet Orange, the familiar, sugary version of the fruit dominant today.  In fact, they imported so many Sweet Oranges, that the Turks called the fruit a "portakal," from the name Portugal.  Other European customers of the Portuguese just called the fruit a Chinese Apple, as in German "Apfelsine" or Dutch "sinaasappel." Although, from what I understand, both languages also use some variant of "orange" today.

The word was first used in English to describe the color of things in the early part of the 1500's, as in this 1543 inventory of the Royal Wardrobe (taken from the Oxford English Dictionary Online Edition): "104 Item thrie peces of courtingis for the chepell of oringe hew."  This follows a trend of naming yellowish-red colors after the fruit almost everywhere the orange went.  So, what did we call orange hued things before then?  I don't know, but I'm willing to guess that it was probably some variation on "red-" or "yellow-ish."  Color terms are notoriously fuzzy, and will quickly multiply as the demand for precise definition changes, as anyone who has ever bought paint can attest.

Once the color word had been peeled away from the fruit itself, "orange" could become a metaphor for  nearly anything.  Through its coincidental connection with Orange (the Principality), the word and the color denote social-political distinctions in parts of Europe, much like red and blue do in America.  The color has come to be associated with Royalism in the Netherlands and Protestantism in Northern Ireland.  Orange was also the color of Viktor Yushenko's political party in Ukraine's Orange Revolution, which took place in 2004-05.

Back across the Atlantic, Orange can refer to athletes who play for Syracuse University.  More notorious is Agent Orange, a mix of two phenoxyl herbicides named for the color of the stripe painted across the 55 gallon drums it was shipped in.  Along with Agent Purple, Pink, Green, Blue and White, it was sprayed on forests by the US military during the Vietnam War to deny Communist forces the protection of Vietnam's dense jungles.  It's negative health effects has made it a symbol for State sponsored callousness among peace activists.  Agent Orange also gave its name to a punk rock band established in 1979 in (wait for it...) Orange County, California.  A region whose famous groves of sweet, golden citrus fruit stare across the Pacific Ocean, straining to see their ancestral home just beyond the western horizon.
 

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Research for this article came from the Oxford English Dictionary, Random House Dictionary (2009) and the Online Etymological Dictionary, as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia and the accumulated scrapings of my own brain.  Phonetic pronunciations are approximate and probably wildly inaccurate. If you would like to be notified whenever a new Word of the Moment is posted, send an eMail to Schendo.