Orange

How to spell orange

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce orange

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does orange mean?

1. nounA round citrus fruit with a reddish-yellow rind and sweet, juicy segments.
2. adjectiveHaving the reddish-yellow colour between red and yellow on the spectrum.

Orange in a sentence

• noun

  She peeled an orange and shared the segments with the children.

• adjective

  The builders wore bright orange safety vests on the site.

• noun

  The breakfast menu offered a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

• adjective

  Autumn turned the maple leaves a deep orange shade.

Where does orange come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

Orange traces back to the Sanskrit naranga, the name of the orange tree, a word that may itself echo a Dravidian source. It travelled westward through Persian narang and Arabic naranj, then into the Romance languages, appearing in Italian as arancia and in Old French as orenge. The most curious thing about the spelling is the lost first letter: phrases such as the French une narange were reanalysed as une arange, so the initial n simply drifted onto the article and vanished. English picked the word up in the 1300s, at first only for the fruit, and the colour sense did not become common until the 1500s, since before that a reddish-yellow shade had no single name of its own. That late arrival is also why orange famously has almost no perfect rhyme in English.

How the word is built

• orange (a single unanalysable root borrowed whole into English; from Sanskrit naranga, with no native prefix, root division, or suffix to break apart)