answer:
Neil deMause writes:
Are oranges called oranges because they're orange, or is orange called orange because oranges are orange?
The color orange is called orange because oranges are orange.
The word orange first entered our English language in the fourteenth century, in reference to the globose citrus fruit of the orange tree (orange referring to the tree itself, as in "groves of oranges," took another 250 or so years to appear).
The earlier history of the word is a bit of a mess, but roughly, English borrowed it from Old French orenge, which borrowed it from Arabic náranj, which borrowed it from Persian nárang, which borrowed it from Sanskrit náranga 'orange tree' (all foregoing acute accents should really be macrons, and the second n in the Sanskrit word should have a dot over it).
If you're wondering what happened to the initial n-, the probable answer is that it was lost by metanalysis, which, we recall, is a change in the division between words, which in English gives rise to an adder, originally a nadder. The original French was probably une narenge, with the definite article absorbing the initial n- of the noun. Spanish, by contrast, also borrowed the Arabic word, but in Spanish it ended up as naranja, since the word didn't undergo metanalysis. The change in French from arange to orenge is thought to be due to the influence of French or 'gold', alluding to the color, or perhaps Orange, a town in southeast France through which oranges were shipped.
The color orange 'a color in the spectrum between red and yellow' comes from the appearance of the fruit. This sense is first found in the sixteenth century.
