So is the fruit named after the color or the color named after the fruit?

The answer is... Why is the food orange called the color orange?

The fruit came first.

The word orange derives from Sanskrit, an ancient language from the Indian subcontinent.

The original Sanskrit word naranga actually means fragrant.

And oranges do smell really good.

From there, both the word and the fruit spread around the world.

It became narang in Persian, naranja in Spanish, arancia in Italian... Start to see the pattern?

And eventually orange in English.

So what was orange the color called before orange the fruit spread far and wide?

Well, linguists think in English the words we use to describe the color we now call orange were just yellow-red or geoluread in Middle English.

But by the 1500s, the word orange joined both our vocabulary and our fruit baskets.

All right, I think it's time for a snack break.

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