What came first, the color orange or the fruit?

Well we know they didn’t name carrots before oranges.

“i think they named oranges before they named carrots.
‘what are these?’
‘those are oranges.’
‘what are these?’
‘oh shit.’
‘long pointies?’” – Demetri Martin

Demitri Martin BABY!!!!

colour existed when light started to appear (~13.6 billion years ago), and the fruit appeared in the meditaranean around 56 million years ago (i could be wrong about the oranges. i vaguely recall hearing about the diversity of greek food on the food network). so i’d have to say the colour came first.

He means the name for orange.

this is also pretty funny and a bit relevant.

@Mtl_zack: haha! That’s great!

Anyway, I think this question is one that actually can be answered, before the orange was introduced to Europe, the color was referred to as geoluhread in England, which translates as yellow-red in middle-english…

The word orange is derived from the sanskrit word nāraṅgaḥ and a host of other languages and it’s derivative ‘orange’ was adopted into almost every European language at the same time in most cases unaltered, which means that the etymology of the word is more closely linked to the introduction of something all at one time, i.e. when someone showed everyone in Europe an orange.

In French, German, Danish, Finnish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish the word is very very similar to the English, while in Eastern Europe the word is more derived from words similar to our word Pomegranite like the Polish Pomarańcza.

Therefore, we can conclude that the fruit is the origin of the color. More at Wikipedia.