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Orange (word)Orange is both a noun and an adjective in the English language. Both refer to many things (see orange (disambiguation)), but primarily the orange fruit and the colour orange. Interestingly, the colour was referred to (in Old English, before the English-speaking world was exposed to the fruit) as geoluhread, which transliterates into Modern English as yellow-red or yellored (both pronounced the same).
EtymologyOrange derives from Sanskrit ' "orange tree", with borrowings through Persian nārang, Arabic nāranj, Spanish naranja, Late Latin arangia, Italian arancia or arancio, and Old French orenge, in chronological order. The first appearance in English dates from the 14th century. The name of the colour is derived from the fruit, first appearing in this sense in the 16th century. Multiple sources conjecture that the Sanskrit word itself derives from an unknown Dravidian source, based on the historical spread of oranges through the world. There is disagreement as to whether the Old French borrowed the Italian melarancio (with mela "fruit", i.e. melarancio "fruit of the orange tree") as pume orenge (with pume "fruit") (deMause, 1998), or whether it borrowed Arabic nāranj, with no intermediate step (AHD, 2000). In any case, the initial n was lost before the word entered English. The French shift from arenge to orenge may have been influenced by the French word or (gold) — in reference to the colour of oranges — or by the name of Orange, France, a major distribution point of oranges to northern regions. The name of the village did not derive from the word: in Old Provençal, it was known as Aurenja, with the initial sound later shifting (McPhee, 1975) (the original Roman name of the village was Arausio and came from a Celtic water god). The village name and fruit name thus converged coincidentally, one becoming associated with the other. Later, the sovereign principality of Orange was the property of the House of Orange (later House of Orange-Nassau), which adopted both fruit and colour (already associated with the principality) as its symbols. Many things were in turn named after this royal House, which is the present ruling monarchy of the Netherlands. In Dutch, however, as well as in the Nordic languages, the fruit is known as "Chinese apples." RhymeOrange is notable as one of the most common words in English that does not rhyme with any other word. The closest "real" approximation is door-hinge, although torn hinge and flange [1] have also been suggested. Some made-up words have rhymed with orange:
Tom Lehrer once rhymed "orange" in the verse:
This is an example of extreme enjambement and the New York-New Jersey accent's way of pronouncing orange as "ar-ange." The Flaming Lips included the following verse in their 1993 song "She Don't Use Jelly":
In this case, the rhyme is achieved by slurring the last syllable of orange, emphasizing the rhyme of or- with store. A children's rhyme from Mother Goose features a rhyme with orange as part of a solution for another tricky word, porringer:
In Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, Christina Rossetti wrote What is Pink? which begins:
It continues assigning colours to objects, and it ends with orange:
This plays on the fact that oranges are orange, and that no "proper" rhyme exists. References
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