Wondering if the color was born first orange or the fruit orange It’s a bit like asking if theegg or the hen. In this case the answer is there: first comes the fruitthen the name of the color. The word was born from the Portuguese Laranjawhich in turn derives fromArabicfrom the Persian and even further back from Sanskrit.
The story of the word “orange”: where does it come from and what does it mean?
There are news of the presence of oranges since the times of Romansimported From Arabia to Sicily: tradition has it that, in the cloister of the convent of Santa Sabina on the Colle dell’Aventino, there is one sweet orange plant planted by San Domenico in person in 1200. The diffusion of the fruit, however, It seems to have stopped in Sicilyto then be rediscovered about two centuries later, precisely from Portuguese, in the fifteenth century.
There Word “orange”Therefore, it sinks its origin precisely in the history of the peoples who introduced it to our peninsula: the Portuguese term Laranja derives in turn from the Arabic nāranjwith which the “bitter orange” is defined specifically, a term very similar to Persian Nāran jwho probably wants to say “the fruit most loved by elephants”, a term of Sanskrit origin.
Interesting to observe that the sweet orange, in Arabic, is called instead Burtuqāla word very similar to “Portugal”. The Portuguese, in fact, not only imported the fruit, but also largely cultivated it in their sunny lands.
Even in several Italian dialects the word “orange” is very similar to “Portugal”: Pureuuàll ‘ (Neapolitan), Pattuàllu (Sicilian), purut (Abruzzese), holder (Salentino), and several others.
The orange color, known by the Renaissance and made official by Newton
Before the oranges spread to Europe, the orange colorthe result of the union between red and yellowwas classically defined as “red”: And in fact, even today, we define “red” elements that are actually orange, such as red hair and red fish.
The first news of the use of the term “orange” to define the color they date back to 1500century in which, in fact, orange spreads in Europe. In the 1502 are described with the term “Orange” – declination in French and English of the same root nāranj – The fabrics for the wedding of Princess Margaret Tudor with the king of Scotland, Giacomo IV.
But we have to wait for the 1672 because the orange color is officially recognized in the chromatic spectrum: this occurs Thanks to Isaac Newton that elaborates what will go down in history as “Newton’s album”optical tool composed of Seven colors of the rainbow. Among these, the orange also appears.
