Andy asked me which came first: orange as the name of the fruit or the color? And then he asked a few more times, so I gathered that he meant it.

The fruit. It goes back to at least 2500 BC (China) and is the most widely cultivated fruit tree on the planet.

It looks like the word began way back. I see references to Sanskrit (nārangah meant orange tree) and even to a Dravidian root meaning fragrant. It passed through Arabic (nâranj) and Persian (nārang) and landed in Spanish (naranja) before it started to lose the initial “n.”

When Danny was a little guy, he thought his favorite fruit was called a napple. In similar fashion, naranj was usually preceded by an indefinite article that ended with an “n” sound – like une or un – and it isn’t surprising that “une naranj” became “un orenge” (Old French). I read that the process is called juncture loss (Danny must have been practicing juncture gain). I conjecture that the Spanish never lost the initial “n” because the word is feminine so the indefinite article ended in “a” and adequately separated the two “n’s.”

While collecting these etymological nuggets, I gleaned the following about the fruit:

It’s a berry (hesperidium).

It was probably originally a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin.

The naval orange carries its own undeveloped twin (the berry ate the baby!)