Two navel oranges, one whole and the other cut into pieces
6 July 2021
One would think that color terms are basic to the language and would be among the earliest words recorded, but this is not always the case. In English, for example, orange is a relatively late addition to the language, dating to the mid sixteenth century. The color orange comes to us from the name of the fruit, which is recorded in English before the hue. The English orange is borrowed from French, which in turn comes from the Italian arancio, which is from the Arabic naranj—and is a nice example of rebracketing, un naranj dropping the second <n> and becoming un arancio. And the Arabic comes from the Persian narang, a sequence that nicely portrays the relevant trade route through which the then-exotic fruit would pass.
The fruit is first recorded in English in the fourteenth century in a Latin-English dictionary, the Sinonoma Bartholomei:
Citrangulum pomum, orenge.
These medieval oranges weren’t the ones we usually find in grocery stores today. They were the bitter or Seville orange (Citrus aurantium). Sweet oranges, like the Valencia, weren’t imported to Europe until the sixteenth century.
The color orange is recorded by 1557, but there are some precursor appearances earlier in the century. The phrase orenge colour appears in a will dated 1512. This is a neat example of the transition from the fruit to the color. It’s not a name for the hue, but rather a description of it that uses the fruit. Also, Wikipedia cites a 1502 appearance of orange, but only gives secondary sources as references and doesn’t not specify the document the word allegedly appears in. I wonder if this 1502 appearance is of orange color as well, as opposed to an antedating of the stand-alone orange.
The 1577 appearance of the stand-alone orange, meaning the color, is in an English law limiting the colors in which woolen cloth could be made:
And moreover, be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that no person nor persons after the said feast of the nativity of St. John Baptist shall sell or put to sale within the realm of England any coloured cloth of any other colour or colours than are hereafter mentioned, that is to say, scarlet, red, crimson, morrey, violet, pewke, brown, blue, black, green, yellow, blue, orange, tawny, russet, marble grey, sad new colour, azure, watchet, sheeps colour, lion colour, motly, iron grey, friers grey, crane colour, purple, and old medley colour, most commonly used to be made above and before twenty years past.
Orange is also the name of a town in Provence, southern France, but this name is etymologically unrelated to the fruit or the color—although it has since become associated with the color. The town’s and associated principality’s name is from the Latin Arausio, named after a Celtic god. Over the centuries this came to be pronounced and spelled as orange.
The Dutch royal family is descended from the princes of Orange in Provence, hence the association of the color with Holland. And King William III of England, of the duo William and Mary, was the prince of Orange. Through him, the color became associated with Protestantism, particularly Protestantism in Northern Ireland.
References to the principality can be found in English by 1540. There is this letter written by the poet and diplomat Thomas Wyatt to Henry VIII on 9 March 1540. Wyatt was in Flanders on a diplomatic mission and toward the end of the letter he reports on the status of Christina of Denmark, the Duchess of Milan. After the death of Jane Seymour, his third wife, Henry had attempted to marry Christina. But being aware of how Henry treated his wives, she had no interest in him and the negotiations fell through, and Henry ended up marrying, for a short while, Anne of Cleves. In the letter, Wyatt reports that the then-current queen’s brother, the Duke of Cleves, was courting Christina, but that she was really in love with René of Chalon, the Prince of Orange, and, in an obvious attempt to stay on the good side of the mercurial and autocratic king, that Henry is lucky to have escaped that marriage:
Adde to this that it is here sayd, and the Duke of Cleves owne servant told it me to[o] that he herd it of men of reputation that thei were abowt to gyve the Duke of Cleves a mariage of the Duchesse of Millan. And to confirme that I note that the king of Romaines promising to do the best he cowld for the Duke toward th'emperour aduisid hym not to seme to insult against th'emperour but rather to go humbly to work with hym, and he shold have the best mene he cowld.
I aduertisid hym to aduise his master in Case of mariage to vse his ffrendes Councell. And herein, if I shalbe plaine with your maiestie, I can not but reioyse in maner the skape that yow made there. Ffor altho I suppose nothing but honor in the lady, yet me thinkyth your highnes make wold be withowt note or suspect. And there is thowght affection bytwene the prynce of Orenge and her, and hath bene of long; wich for her bringing vp in Italy may be notyd but service wich she can not let, yet I have herd it to procede partly from her own occasion. Off this your maiestie juge and do with your ffrend as ye shall think mete.
Henry would end up sending Anne of Cleves packing shortly after this letter was written and marrying his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Anne spent the rest of her days living quietly on an estate in the English countryside. Christina ended up marrying the future Duke of Lorraine, so she didn’t end up with the spouse she wanted, but she did end up better off than Catherine Howard, who lost her head. None of this is really related to orange, but it’s better than anything a Hollywood scriptwriter could dream up, and it’s just the sort of juicy tidbit you find when you start looking at the contexts in which words are used.
Sources:
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. orange, n.
Mowat, J.L.G. Sinonoma Bartholomei. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Orange (colour).” Wikipedia. Accessed 11 July 2021.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. orange, n.1 and adj.1, Orange, n.2 and adj.2, orange colour | orange color, n. (and adj.)
Pickering, Danby, ed. “An Act Touching the Making of Woolen Clothes” (1557). The Statutes at Large, from the First Year of Queen Mary, to the Thirty-Fifth Year of Queen Elizabeth, Inclusive, vol. 6. Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, 1763, 100. Google Books.
Wyatt, Thomas. “Letter to Henry VIII” (9 March 1540). Kenneth Muir. Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1963, 148–49. HathiTrust Digital Archive. British Library, MS Harley 282.
Photo credit: Evan-Amos, 2012. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
