Colour or Fruit?

[The Vortex]

What came first. The colour orange or the fruit orange?

[ugly_bob]

I would imagine the colour orange was around before the fruit evolved.
Lava, after all can be orange, and there is orange in the rainbow.
I think both these things were around before life on earth.

[Loosehead]

The colour was obviously around before the fruit but I think the questioner meant was the colour named after the fruit or the was the fruit named after the colour.

[The Vortex]

Yes I did Loosehead!

[rojash]

Bet you didn't know that what we now call the orange was originally called the norange! The N migrated from the start of the word to the end of the indefinite article to change a norange into an orange

[glesga123]

And i'm off to eat a napple!

[rojash]

Got this:

"The color is named after the fruit. The English derives from Old French, but originally it comes from the Arabic naranj. Cognates are found in the Tamil, Hindi, and Persian."

from here:

http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorn.htm

[Quizmonster]

Colours such as orange, lime, pistachio, turquoise and so on are obviously named from the fruits, gems etc they refer to. In every case, the name of the thing predates the name of the colour. In the list below, the earliest recorded use of the name of the thing is given at (i) and the earliest recorded use of the name of the colour is given at (ii):-
a. Orange.........(i) 1300s...(ii) 1600s
b. Lime.............(i) 1600s...(ii) 1800s (originally as lime-green)
c. Pistachio......(i) 1500s...(ii) 1700s
d. Turquoise.. .(i) 1300s...(ii) 1800s
In other words, people had been familiar with the item for centuries before they started to use its name to refer to its colour wherever it might be found.

[cascarelli]

So what did people call the colour orange before they saw the fruit orange?

[heathfield]

As QM says above - in England, the colour was referred to some 300 years before the fruit was seen.
The name is derived from an ancient Indian word, and many such words found their way into European languages as a result of the movement of peoples in pre-history. Since several vegetable dyes produce the colour there must have been a word for it here from very ancient times. Unfortunately, in Britian, no written records have been found from before the 1300's that describe the colour. So it looks like we may never know.

[gastwo]

Sorry, Heathfield, but doesn't QM say that the fruit was around 300 years before the colour?

[Garamond]

There's 29 days in February every fourth year, if that's an help.