Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange”

The human eye can distinguish millions of shades of color, subtly discriminating small differences of energy along the visual spectrum.

No language, however, has words for more than about 1,000 of these, even with compounds and metaphors (for example, a color term like “watermelon red” or “midnight blue”). Most languages have far fewer, and almost no speakers of any language, other than interior designers or cosmeticians, know more than about 100 of these.

In whatever language, the available color words cluster around a small category of what linguistic anthropologists often call basic color terms. These words do not describe a color; they merely give it a name. They are focalizing words, and are usually defined as “the smallest subset of color words such that any color can be named by one of them.” In English, for example, “red” is the basic color term for a whole range of shades that we are willing to think of (or are able to see) as red, whereas the names we give any of the individual shades are specific to them and don’t serve a similarly unifying function. Scarlet is just scarlet.

Most of the individual words for shades of red take their names from things that are that particular shade: maroon, for example, which comes from the French word for chestnut—or burgundy, ruby, fire engine, or rust. Crimson is a little different: it comes from the name of a Mediterranean insect whose dried bodies were used to create the vibrant red dye. Magenta is also different. It takes (or, rather, was given) its name from a town in northern Italy, near which Napoleon’s troops defeated an Austrian army in June 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence.

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