Which came first - orange the colour or orange the fruit? Do the two concepts share the same word in

Which came first - orange the colour or orange the fruit? Do the two concepts share the same word in all languages?

Andy Kelk, London

• Orange the fruit came first. The word came into English either from Old French 'pomme d'orenge', or from the Spanish 'naranja' (with the subsequent transfer of the 'n' over to the indefinite article, as per 'apron' and 'adder', originally 'napron' and 'nadder'). The Spanish word is itself a modification of the Arabic 'naaranj' (cf. also Persian 'naarang'). Our colour term thus derives from the name of the fruit, not the other way round; we also have apricot, peach, violet, lilac, maroon, indigo, burgundy, and so on, which show how productive this process of colour naming is. The second part of the question assumes that all languages have a name for the colour, which does not seem to be the case. According to work carried out by Berlin and Kay in the 1960s, most of the world's languages have far fewer basic colour terms than English and other European languages do. Some make do with only two colour names - equivalent perhaps to 'dark', and 'light' - but three- and five-colour systems seem to be among the most common. A name for a mixture of red and yellow is actually pretty rare cross-linguistically. Presumably English didn't have a basic term for the hue before oranges started to hit the market stalls, though of course that doesn't mean that people couldn't distinguish orange from red, yellow, or any other colour, and they could certainly have described orange using other basic colour terms, just as speakers of languages which do not feature a basic term for orange can. See www.percep.demon.co.uk for further details. By the by, the placename in France, after which William of Orange and the Orange Order are named, is purely coincidental; it derives from the Latin 'Arausio'.

  Dominic Watt, Dominic Watt, Department of Linguistics & Phonetics, University of Leeds

• What are you talking about? The colour of an orange is carrot.

  Mark Lewney, Cardiff

• In Ivrit (Modern Hebrew), orange (the colour) is "katom". Orange (the fruit) is "tapuach zahav" - literally "golden apple".

  Benjy Arnold, London

• When I was on a kibbutz in Israel, we got green oranges as well... Apparently it happens if there's not enough water, the inside ripens first (and indeed, inside, they were a perfectly normal, orange orange!). These are then used on the kibbutz, but not exported - even though they are perfectly fine, they wouldn't sell.

  Benjy Arnold, London

• I could add this from a Dutch (Flemish) perspective: the standard term is 'sinaasappel' (like in Danish, Norwegian), meaning an apple from China (certainly not 'his apple', as the Danish gentleman suggests). In Flemish we have a local variant 'appelsien', containing the same two elements...

  Jan Glorieux, Tiegem, Belgium, Flanders