The colour orange is named after the fruit (not the other way round)

It seems obvious that the orange is named after its colour, but it happened exactly the other way round. The word travelled with the tree: from Sanskrit nāraṅga to Persian nārang, then to Arabic nāranj, entering the Iberian Peninsula with the Arabs alongside the first orange trees. For centuries, «orange» was only a fruit.

The colour had no name of its own. Old English used geoluread, literally «yellow-red»; other tongues made do with «saffron», «tawny» or «reddish». Only once the fruit became common in Europe did its name start to be used for the shade: in English, the first records of orange as a colour date from the early sixteenth century.

That chronology left some curious traces. The robin was christened before the word existed: its breast is textbook orange, yet it's called a redbreast across half of Europe. And people with unmistakably orange hair are still called redheads.

Language arrives late to some colours. And when it finally does, it sometimes comes from a tree.