Other forms: oranges
An orange is a sweet citrus fruit with the same name as its colour. Peel an orange, orange juice, a bag of oranges.
The fruit named the colour rather than the other way round: before oranges reached England the colour was called geoluread, yellow-red. It is a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin, bred long ago in China, so the sweet orange has never existed in the wild. Note blood orange, Seville orange; and that orange famously has no perfect rhyme in English.
1nounorangeA sweet citrus fruit.
“She peeled an orange and shared it with her little brother.”
2nouncolourThe colour between red and yellow.
“She painted the bedroom walls a warm orange.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
orange is a fruit, or a colour.
Old French pome orenge came through Arabic and Persian from Sanskrit naranga. The initial n was lost by the a norange being heard as an orange.
Middle English
orenge
English, today
orange
Built from
From Middle English orenge. Middle English orenge, orange, from Old French pome orenge (“fruit orange”), influenced by the place name Orange (which is from Gaulish and unrelated to the word for the fruit and colour) and by Old Occitan auranja and calqued from roa-oit melarancio, melarancia, compound of mela (“apple”) and un'arancia (“an orange”), from Arabic نَارَنْج, from Early fa-cls نَارَنْگْ, from Sanskrit नारङ्ग (“orange tree”), ultimately from dra. Compare Tamil நாரங்காய், compound of நாரம் (“water”) and காய் (“fruit”); also te నారంగము, నారింజ, Malayalam നാരങ്ങ, kn ನಾರಂಗಿ). a doublet of aranzada. Originally borrowed as the surname (derived from the place name) in the 13th century, before the sense of the fruit was imported in the late 14th century and the colour in 1510. In the colour sense, largely displaced ġeolurēad, whence yellow-red.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA