Why was it called an orange?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

February 14, 2003

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Linguistic, archaeological, and 'center of diversity' evidence places the domestication of Citrus fruits in China, Southeast Asia, and the Indus Valley around 4000 BCE. Ancient Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans knew citrus in the form of the citron. Romans called the fruit, citrus or citrea, from the Greek, kitrea. Linnaeus kept the Latin for the generic designation.

By the later years of the Roman Empire lemons and sour and sweet oranges were well-known in the eastern Mediterranean. When the Empire fell, most citrus were lost to Europe. Arabic traders and armies reintroduced lemons and sour oranges from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Orange Fruits and Blossom (Citrus aurantium sinensis)
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Sweet oranges are relatively recent introductions to the Western world (mid-1400s or early 1500s). The trees were 'created' and domesticated by the cultures of southern and eastern Asia. According to Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (using the Harvard-Kyoto convention transliteration), two of the Sanskrit names for the orange tree are yoga-raGga and nAgaraGga. According to the 1889 Century Unabridged Dictionary, from the Sanskrit came the Hindi, narangi, and the Pali (scholarly language of Theravada Buddhism), narango.

In ancient Persian, it was called the narang and in Arabic, naranj. The Arabic name passed to the Spanish, naranja, and the Portuguese, laranja. In Italy and France, the Arabic name was combined with Latin aurum (the color gold) becoming arancia and auranja, respectively.

Eric Partridge offers an alternate derivation: "the change from naranja to aranja was caused by confusion of the -n of the indefinite article un, un naranja becoming un aranja." (Origins, a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1983, Greenwich House) The English word, orange, did not appear in print until around 1542. Oddly, the color orange appears to have been named for the fruit.

Helen Watson of Britannia has posted Boodle's Orange Fool, a dessert specialty of Boodle's Club of London. To view the recipe, click on the link:

http://www.britannia.com/cooking/recipes/boodlesorangefool.html

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