this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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The source for this is old reddit threads, so hardly authoritative, but supposedly the color orange was actually named after the food item.
Yes indeed. Before we had "orange", and also "purple" everything was just "red" which is why we have red onions and red cabbage that are anything but red and several species of bird are called red despite being clearly orange coloured.
Purple was sort of around. There was a dye derived by clams with a name that sounds like purple by the Phoenicians, Greeks, then Romans, and was more of a red-purple to red, but that eventually evolved into the word we use now. They also attributed it to the color of wine and of all things, the ocean.
Weirdly blue is a pretty rare color concept in the ancient world, and a number of cultures often just combined it with green, or vice versa. The closest to blue as a concept they usually got was indigo, another dye imported from India, and they'd dilute that into woad for a slightly lighter more pastel/ periwinkle blue (it wouldn't stick as well as true indigo though).
And why orange haired people still have red hair.
Sometimes I learn something that makes me think, how the hell had I not figured that out sometime in the past half-century.
For some reason, french has a specific term for orange/red hair that's quite old. So we don't have red haired people. I don't know if other languages share this.