... called pinhnytes , or " pine nuts " ( again , not the kind we eat today , just another word for pinecones ) . Apples to oranges Word nerds of the world know that the fruit called an " orange " got its name before the color . Persian oranges ... "A burst of delight on every page!" Mignon Fogarty, host of the Grammar Girl podcast Did you know that an "astronaut" is literally a "star sailor," that a thesaurus is, in fact, a "treasure trove" of words, and that someone who is "sinister" is actually just "left-handed"? Have you ever wondered why English isn't considered a Romance language if 60% of our words are Latin-derived? Did Shakespeare really invent 1,700 words, and if not, why the heck do we say that he did? Why is the English language stuffed with so many synonyms? Let's be real: English can seem pretty bonkers. And, well, sometimes it is. But through thorough thought and a pinch of curiosity, method can be found within the madness of our modern tongue-even within the disparate pronunciation of the words "through," "thorough,"

A color term (or color name) is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color group. The color term may refer to human perception of that color (which A color term (or color name) is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color group. The color term may refer to human perception of that color (which is affected by visual context) which is usually defined according to the Munsell color system, or to an underlying physical property (such as a specific wavelength on the spectrum of visible light). There are also numerical systems of color speci Pink was originally a descriptive color term derived from the name of a flower called a 'pink'. However, because the word 'pink' is rarely used to refer to the flower anymore, relative to its common usage as a color, it is often regarded as an abstract color term. Purple is another example of this shift, as it was originally a word that referred to the dye named Tyrian purple, which took its name from the Latin purpura, which referred to both the dye and the sea snail from which the dye was derived. However, this etymological link has been lost in translation. Orange is difficult to categorize as abstract or descriptive because both its uses, as a color term and as a word for an object, are very common and it is difficult to distinguish which of the two is primary. In English, the use of the word 'orange' for a fruit predates its use as a color term. The word comes from French orenge, which derives via Arabic ‏نارنج‎ (nāranj) and Sanskrit नारङ्ग (nāraṅga) from a Dravidian language such as Tamil or Tulu. The derived form orangish as a color is attested from the late 19th century by reference to the fruit.

In a situation where you want to refer to a colour and either you don't know of any name for that colour or you know the name but you also believe your interlocutor doesn't know it - you'll instinctively resort to the evocation of an object characterised by that colour. The same holds true for other senses by the way. Would you rather say for instance "there's a smell of rotten egg" or "there's a smell of hydrogen sulfide"? So, unless one wants to tell the policeman "I think the light was still in the 580-620 nm range when I crossed!", we need aliases for colours. As for the orange colour, interestingly enough, the Old English word was "geoluread" (PDE yellow-red, G. gelb-rot). One has to say that in those times, very few people in England had had a chance of seeing real oranges. The fact that oranges are quite alone in their category of orange-coloured objects added to their simple shap