Did you ever want to know whether the fruit was named after the colour or whether it was the other way around? Of course you did.
Reddit is a fun place and they have found the answer to the question you never knew you wanted the answer to. According to Redditors, the earliest known uses of the word “orange” refer to the fruit first, according to T.A. Kenner’s book Symbols and Their Hidden Meanings.
Before the fruit became known to the word, the colour was referred to as “yellow-red” or “red-yellow.” The French are behind the whole thing, by the way. According to Reddit, The word “orange” came about as a result of the Old French and Anglo-Norman French word “orenge,” derived from the old term for the fruit, pomme [apple!] d’orenge. (In English: like apples to oranges).
