EXPLAINER: Sorry, Sharmaine, but orange was your name before the color borrowed it

Was the fruit named after the color, or did the color borrow its name from the fruit?

You are scrolling through social media when a bizarre but hilarious video appears on your feed.

An orange is having an existential crisis.

The fruit complains that it never asked to be named after a color. In fact, it argues that people should stop calling it “orange” altogether and rename it something else—perhaps Sharmaine.

As absurd as the joke sounds, it raises a surprisingly fascinating question that many people have never stopped to consider:

Was the fruit named after the color, or was the color named after the fruit?

The answer may disappoint the fictional Sharmaine campaign.

The fruit came first.

The orange that wasn’t a color

Today, it feels impossible to separate the word “orange” from the bright color associated with sunsets, basketballs, and traffic cones.

But for centuries, English speakers had no word for that color.

Before “orange” entered the language, people described the hue as a variation of red or yellow. In Old English, the shade was sometimes called ġeolurēad, which literally meant “yellow-red.”

Not exactly a catchy color name.

This linguistic gap explains why many things we consider orange today are still described as red. Think of red foxes, robin redbreasts, and even redheads. Their coloring is closer to orange than true red, but the names were established long before the color acquired its modern label.

The long journey of a fruit

The story begins not in Europe but in Asia.

The word traces its roots to the Sanskrit nāraṅga, which referred to the orange tree. As trade routes expanded, the term traveled westward, becoming nārang in Persian and nāranj in Arabic.

When the fruit reached Spain during the period of Moorish influence, it became naranja. The French later transformed the word into orange, and by the late 1300s, English speakers had adopted it to describe the citrus fruit.

At that point, “orange” referred exclusively to something you could peel and eat.

Not a color.

When the fruit became a color swatch

As oranges became more common in European markets, people started using the fruit as a convenient visual reference.

Instead of describing something as “yellow-red” or “the color of an orange,” they eventually shortened the description to simply “orange.”

By the early 1500s, the word had evolved beyond the fruit and officially entered the English language as the name of the color itself.

In other words, the fruit became so famous that it lent its name to an entire section of the rainbow.

Sorry, Sharmaine

The viral joke works because it flips our modern assumptions.

Most people instinctively think the fruit must have been named after its color, just as blueberries are blue and blackberries are black.

History, however, reveals the opposite.

The orange was an orange before orange was orange.

So while the internet may continue campaigning to rename the fruit Sharmaine, history has already rendered its verdict.

The citrus fruit won the naming rights centuries ago—and the color has been borrowing its identity ever since.

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