30th October '17: The story of orange

Happy Monday, my colour-loving chums 🎃🍊🎃🍊One of my favourite times in the calendar is when the Oxford Dictionary announces its word of the year (recent offerings include selfie, post-truth, vaping and even ‘Face With Tears Of Joy’ Emoji 😂. What will it be this time? Suggestions?) I find the evolution of language utterly fascinating. Just as it feels there can’t possibly be any new words or terms out there, they (or is that ‘we’?) go and do it again. I was fascinated to read that until the early 1500s we didn’t have the term ‘orange’ in our language. That only came to England with the arrival of the fruit (the fruit name, which hails from India’s Dravidian languages, was then applied to the colour). Before that the colour was known as ‘ġeolurēad‘ which literally meant ‘yellow-red’ in Old English. Beautifully literal.

Martha, The Colour File x

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©Martha Roberts

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