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Which Came First: Orange the Fruit or Orange the Color?

Which Came First: Orange the Fruit or Orange the Color?4 dagen geleden8 min

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Which came first: orange the fruit or orange the color? It sounds like a simple question.. until you realize that orange-colored sunsets, fire, animals, leaves, and hair obviously existed long before English speakers had a name for the color.Today, I trace the surprising history and etymology of the word “orange” from ancient Sanskrit through Persian, Arabic, the Mediterranean, and eventually English. Along the way, we’ll follow the history of the orange fruit, find out what medieval Europeans actually meant when they talked about oranges, and investigate a popular claim about how the word supposedly lost its original N.But the bigger mystery is what English speakers called the color orange before “orange” became a color word. That takes us into Old English color vocabulary, Chaucer’s description of a fox as somewhere between yellow and red, Shakespeare’s unusual use of “orange-tawny,” and Isaac Newton’s famous experiments with the visible spectrum.We’ll also get into rebracketing and juncture loss, why apron used to be napron, the completely unrelated origin of the Dutch House of Orange, and the strange linguistic reason people with unmistakably orange hair are still called redheads.It’s a story about word origins, etymology, color history, linguistics, medieval English, Shakespeare, Newton, and how languages divide up the world around us, all hiding inside one incredibly ordinary word.🍊 So: fruit or color—which came first?Music thanks to Zapsplat.<ul><li>Anglo-Norman Dictionary. (n.d.). Orange. Anglo-Norman Dictionary.</li><li>Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Apron. Etymonline.</li><li>Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Orange. Etymonline.</li><li>Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Redhead. Etymonline.</li><li>Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.). Much Ado About Nothing. Folger Shakespeare Library.</li><li>Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.). A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Folger Shakespeare Library.</li><li>Harvard University. (n.d.). The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Geoffrey Chaucer Website.</li><li>Newton, I. (1704). Opticks: Or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. London.</li><li>Topper, D. (1990). Newton on the number of colours in the spectrum. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 21(2), 269–279.</li><li>University of Glasgow. (n.d.). Old English colour vocabulary. University of Glasgow.</li></ul>#Etymology #WordOrigins #LanguageHistory #DidYouKnow #orange #historyfacts #LearnOnSpotifySources