Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)

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94 pointsmattowen_uk121 comments

Orange isn't unique. Pink and violet are derived via the same process. I'm always amused by reports on languages with limited color terms because their speakers can always fall back on "color of foo" to describe colors without a dedicated word.

In many languages the distinction is quite blurred. In Japanese, most color words like 茶色 chairo (brown), 灰色 hairo (gray), 黄色 kiiro (yellow), 紅色 beniiro (crimson/red) incorporate the word "iro" (color), but while the first two are tea-color and ash-color, ki 黄 and beni 紅 now just mean "yellow" and "red" respectively.

It looks like 黄 and 紅 never had a distinctive non-color meaning (as characters) without 色, so maybe using them without 色 is more a recovery of their historic meanings rather than an invention of a new meaning?

(That's just a guess, I especially don't know the roles that written and spoken forms have played in the evolution of these meanings, or whether spoken "ki" and "beni" did or didn't have independent meanings.)

I can provide some non-native commentary on modern Mandarin Chinese. All color terms are most ordinarily used with 色 ("color"); it is unusual, though possible, to use a color term by itself.

It doesn't seem like a big stretch to imagine that this was also true when the terminology was borrowed into Japan from China, and that's why the 色 gets used in Japanese.

I can't claim to be an expert, but this is likely correct. The native Japanese words for color (shiro, kuro, aka, ao, midori etc) don't use the -色/iro suffix.

Note that you still can use the the iro/color suffix for aka (red), ao (blue), midori (green), you just don't have to and they also function as standalone adjectives.

E.g. akai (赤い) -- red (adjective) vs akairo (赤色) -- the color red (noun)

compare: chaiiroi (茶色い) -- light brown (adjective) vs chaiiro (茶色) the color light brown (noun) -- literally "tea color"

Japanese has the cool feature that you can clearly identify siro/kuro/aka/ao (a fairly typical four-way white/black/red-yellow/blue-green distinction) as the most basic colour words with relatively little diachronic analysis: they're the ones that stand alone in the rather limited class of 形容詞 ("i-adjective") stems.

You can almost trace the development of colour terms through the vocabulary strata...

Does anyone know why some European languages (notably German) have different words for the fruit "apfelsine" and the colour "orange"? In German they are mostly interchangeable (as I understand), but some languages still have the distinction.

There is actually a native plant 'sea buckthorn' with fruits that are very orange coloured. It is rather common in some parts of Europe. What colour was this called before 'orange'?

It derives from "Chinese apple".

In Swedish, apelsin and orange are distinct and not interchangeable. Sibling comment about Chinese apple seems credible to me.

I can think of several orange things other than oranges: sea buckthorn as you say, but also cloudberries and carrots (which I don't get why they are dismissed by the article: not vibrant enough? Nor is a fox…?).

An older word for orange (ish?) I can think of is brandgul. Brand is a big fire, and gul is yellow, so "big-fire yellow" if you will. Still a variation of yellow, but yet another naturally occurring orange :)

Orange carrots do not have a relatively long history as part of our cuisine. Reading the wikipedia article may satisfy your curiosity - it's more than I can condense at this hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot?wprov=sfla1

Good point. Carrot with today's colour wouldn't be around before the fruit arrived in Europe. You would be more likely to find white carrots, for example.

I don’t think foxes are orange enough that you would make up a new word if you already had brown and red.

> What colour was this called before 'orange'?

I think they would have said yellow, gold, saffron, or red.

light brown?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

In Germany, this is just a regional thing. Where I come from (southern Germany), the word "Apfelsine" is not used at all. If you used it here, people would most likely immediately ask if you mean an orange. As I understand it, it's only used north of the "Speyer Line":

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speyerer_Linie_(Isoglosse)

One explanation would be that southern Germany has more direct contact to France, and therefore uses the French "Orange", whereas northern Germany uses the low German "Apel de Sina" (basically "China-Apple", "sina" as in "Sinology"). French words have always been used in the southern parts of the German-speaking world to appear more educated, most notably "Trottoir" instead of "Bürgersteig" (sidewalk) or "Portemonnaie" instead of "Geldbeutel" (wallet). A best-selling cooking book published in Stuttgart in 1791 made heavy use of french kitchen terms and gave the correct pronounciation in brackets (e.g. ragout ("Raguh")) [0]

[0] https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_6f8pAAAAYAAJ/page/n247/mo...

Not exactly answering your first question, but in Catalan the name of "pumpkin" is also used to refer to the orange color. Even though technically this color ("carabassa" [1]) may not be exactly the same as "orange" ("taronja" [2]), it is often used interchangeably, though "orange" is, as far as I can tell, increasingly more common.

[1] https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/carabassa

[2] https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/taronja

The Danish word for orange is "appelsin". Which lead to a funny question from an Irish visitor at the breakfast table once asking me if there "are apples in this juice?", looking at the carton saying "appelsinjuice".

The etymology for that is "apple of China".

I always found it funny how in many languages "potato" is the apple of the earth.

[fr] pomme de terre

[nl] aardappel

[gr] γεώμηλο (γη + μήλο, almost never used though)

Apple used to refer to all "fruit" other than berries in middle English.

[de] Erdapfel (mostly in southern germany, Austria and switzerland, Kartoffel would be common)

That's a weird way to write "Grumbeere" [0]

[0] https://pfl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoffel

I was about to post that, too, but that's "soil pear" and not apple :)

The "prince of orange" predates the arrival of oranges by centuries, is that just a modern translation to english of a french title that used some other word?

From the article:

"There are lots of references to the House of Orange, which still today is officially part of the name of the royal family of the Netherlands (Orange-Nassau); but this use of “Orange” comes neither from the color nor the fruit. It takes its name from a region in southeastern France still known as “Orange.”"

In Dutch, appelsien is archaic, sinaasappel is the modern name. Though the word for juice, sinaasappelsap, is increasingly being replaced with the French jus d'orange.

Despite Dutch not using a variation of "orange" for the fruit, we do use "oranje" for the colour, which, due to the name of our royal house, has also become the national colour.

I find it weird that the article goes on and on about the lack of other words for the colour orange without once mentioning 'ginger'. Which, in the UK at least, has been used to mean orange, or at least a shade of orange, in the context of hair, for longer (I think) than we've had the word 'orange'.

To me "ginger" is a more reddish colour than orange.

That's a good point, but I've just skimmed through the fantastically detailed entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, which seem to suggest that the word "orange" was used in English around 1400 and was used as a colour in 1532, while the word "ginger" was used in English around 1200 (or earlier) and was used as a colour in 1538. Obviously "earliest citation" is not the same thing as "first use" (though it's amazing how many people seem not to understand that) but it doesn't look as though "ginger" as a colour is much older than "orange" as a colour.

On the other hand, the early 16th century is perhaps the earliest point for which we have masses of surviving texts and can therefore get a good idea of which colour names were in use. For earlier periods perhaps there's a good chance that some fairly ordinary words are missing from the record just through bad luck.

Russet is another old color word

Except ginger is no more synonymous with orange than tawny or tangerine are, which they do discuss as close color names for orange.

Ah, this explains why we call it "red" hair instead of "orange". We've been talking about hair ages longer than we've had the word "orange"!

The same for red robins which have orange feathers on their chests

They get redder as they get older.

Orange is light/saturated brown, so maybe they didn’t need a name for it?

Isn’t there the adjective burnt orange? (Of course umber)

Orange revenge is the closest rime I can think of.

Now, on the other hand, oddly[1] some languages[2] use ‘coffee’ for brown. Did they not have the concept of brown? Presumably they had mud and results of the digestive process.

[1] I say oddly because the bean is green and the liquid is more or less black unless looked at under light.

[2] Couleur Cafe https://genius.com/Serge-gainsbourg-couleur-cafe-lyrics

Eminem famously has 'door hinge'

I came to say this. Also, in classical languages there is a color that is used to describe rust, e.g. "rubigo" in Latin. Also, amber ("electrum"/"electron") was known, and surely the color would have been seen during metal working through sparks. I think the point is that it's generally either experienced in nature as part of leaf oxidation or in the manipulation of heat and fire, not as a longstanding color phenomenon like the eponymous fruit.

> Also, in classical languages there is a color that is used to describe rust, e.g. "rubigo" in Latin.

It seems worth observing that rubigo is pretty transparently related to the Latin word ruber, "red". In fact, where ruber is an adjective, rubigo is a noun, referring not to the color rust but to the substance itself. (And, by metaphorical extension, to any undesirable thing collecting on anything else, such as mold growing on grain, scum growing on your teeth, etc.)

>Also, in classical languages there is a color that is used to describe rust, e.g. "rubigo" in Latin.

Such a weird way to have Rust, Ruby and Go in one sentence

I was going to chime in with:

> Orange, however, seems to be the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English

That’s because the basic colour is brown, and orange is the adjective

Orange is a complementary color (secondary) but brown is not there. I mean it is there within the orange, but not as brown itself.

err, do you have that around the wrong way? brown is dark/unsaturated orange?

And the article goes into this, pointing out that before the study of the visible spectrum of light that the relationship between brown and orange would not have been known.

I'm inclined to agree with that, as before learning photography and image manipulation i remember being aware of the colours in the spectrum of visible light, but had no concept of where brown fit in. Why there should be a connection between our experiential concepts of brown and orange seems to me something that comes post-theory rather than a priori...

I'm with you, the relationship between brown and orange is anything but obvious.

Saturation is the wrong word/aspect. The difference between orange and brown is in the luminance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown#Optics For reference.

Orange and brown both fit comfortably in the red-yellow span. It only becomes non-obvious that they're closely related when you do conceive of them as distinct basic colours.

Given that coffee stains things brown I wouldn't think it so odd. Also a lot of blue inks look black in the pen.

> the liquid is more or less black unless looked at under light.

I mean, this is true of everything that doesn't generate its own light.

Note that "couleur café" is not the standard way of saying brown in French. We have the words "marron" (which is literally the colour of a chestnut - in French is it obvious whether it is the colour that comes from the fruit or the reverse) and "brun" (same origin as brown) which are equivalent, one or the other being preferred depending on the region.

"Couleur café" is most often used to refer to skin colour, and mostly for poetic or literary purposes.

In modern Greek, the two fruits called "orange" in English have different names. The bitter orange Citrus × aurantium is called nerantzi, coming from Sanskrit via the Persian naranj. Meanwhile, the sweet orange Citrus × sinensis is called portokali, as it was brought to Greece by Portuguese traders.

The Greek word for the colour orange is also portokali, but with the stress on a different syllable. This is a bit weird, as AFAIK the bitter orange reached Greece first.

In Thai language, the word for orange and the color for orange are the same. Tan and sugar are also the same word, which makes sense because raw sugar is a tan color. Raw sugar is what is commonly sold as sugar Thailand.

But does anything rhyme with orange? Oh yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPcR5RVXHMg

Nitpick: I think Eminem only uses near rhymes, but there are a few true rhymes also.

https://rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=orange&typeofrhyme=pe...

Hrm, do they count as rhymes if they embed the whole word they’re rhyming with? Also “gorringe” is a real noun.

I think the reason nothing rhymes with it is it’s a loan word that the Englishers would have corrupted had it not belonged to the head of state

> Englishers

Haven't heard that word used in a very long time.

"Orange" is actually pronounced /oringe/, so "syringe" and "door hinge" sound like true rhymes to me?

The rhyme has to be from the last accented syllable (otherwise "tinge of fringe in your minge" are rhymes), so syringe isn't, and door hinge only works if you make it a compound word and make hinge unaccented, which means dropping the h. At that point you're in near rhyme territory.

> door hinge only works if you make it a compound word and make hinge unaccented

Rhymes are often judged in the context of spoken language, under which conditions, dropping the h and having hinge be unaccented relative to the preceding door wouldn't be unreasonable or uncommon.

The way I speak that particular h would never naturally get dropped unless I'm slurring badly enough that half my words aren't recognizable.

And long before you reach that point orange will degrade to a single syllable, ornj, ruining the door hinge rhyme.

In the dialect I speak (roughly North Central American), syringe has the stress on the second syllable, which makes the rhyme with orange (ˈôrənj, ˈärənj) a bit awkward. Looking it up, I was surprised that both stress on the first syllable and on the second were listed.

  səˈrinj, ˈsirinj

It piqued my curiosity. May I ask where you've heard the latter?

Interesting. Now that I think about it, /səˈrinj/ sounds quite American to me, while /ˈsirinj/ is more English?

Also, you characterize the 2nd vowel in "orange" as a schwa, but to many people it's /i/:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orange#Pronunciation

I just lazily copied and pasted the phonetics from the New Oxford American Dictionary :)

It's generally in the range of /ɪ/~/ɨ/. Descriptions of English regularly conflate the ɪɛʌ with ə as they behave somewhat similarly wrt stress-related sound changes.

I agree with the issue of stress, but it seems less problematic to me than the vowel mismatch. Orange and door use the FORCE vowel in their first syllables. Syringe doesn't; it uses NURSE, and this is enough to prevent the words from rhyming.

(Perhaps you view orange as using the START vowel in its first syllable. That's still not NURSE and still doesn't rhyme with syringe.)

Purple.

Yes, the word "Borange".

Defintion: A Borange is a word created for the sole purpose of rhyming with word that doesn't have anything that ryhmes with it. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25858732

There is a mountain in South Wales with a name that rhymes with orange: it's called The Blorenge.

Digging into "naranja" (the Spanish name) this article claims that the jump to the french included a latin "golden" component to it (aurum), thus forming "orange". In fact "Citrus Aurantium" is a type of orange.

http://etimologias.dechile.net/?naranja

It also claims that the jump to arancia in Italian comes from the portuguese laranja, losing the "l" as it seems "la arancia".

Finally, tangerine (after Tanger) is called mandarinas (after China) in Spanish, which has been for the longest time a source of confusion for me.

Yes. I was surprised that the OA gets as close as mentioning “golden apple” but misses that the Latin “aurantium” (from pomum aurantium) would sound awfully close to “orange”.

Aurantium is modern Latin though, it's a portmanteau word formed from naranja and aurum. It doesn't help understand the etymology of "orange" because it's been coined at the same time or after the word orange itself.

the "tangerine" is a hybrid of what is also called "mandarin" in english[0] so the spanish (and italian, hungarian et al) naming actually makes sense.

It's pretty common to confuse the two plants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_orange

You are technically correct, but in the common speech "tangerine" is the same as "mandarin" in Spanish (they are not distinguised beyond scientific terms) and every time I've tried to say "mandarin" in English I've been corrected to "do you mean tangerine?" so in practical terms that is the translation for me.

In Ireland, "mandarin" or "mandarin orange" is the most common English name for the orange-coloured citrus fruits that are too small and sweet to be considered oranges. We have a vague idea that mandarins, tangerines, satsumas, clementines, nadorcotts are all different varieties, but the typical catchall is "mandarin" or increasingly in supermarkets, "easy peeler".

You wouldn't be corrected over here.

I concur. Growing up in rural Ireland in the eighties, "mandarins" were quite exotic and a real treat. I still couldn't tell the difference between all the varieties you mention (I haven't even heard of nadorcotts). I've only recently noticed the supermarkes are now selling "easy peelers".

If that etymology of mandarinas is true it is especially funny because it already comes from spanish/portuguese mandar for "telling someone what to do", because mandarin was the dialect of the ruling caste in China, if I remember correctly. So it is basically a loanword from the same language, via a very convoluted transfer of meanings...

It goes full circle: in Argentina we have a common expression for someone who is acting bossy, telling them they ate a lot of "mandarinas".

Languages are wonderful.

Hm, Vietnamese has the same word for the color and fruit as well. Since Vietnam is relatively close to the origin of the fruit, I presume they had oranges long before direct European contact.

So one wonders if the idea of having the same name for both arose independently in both places, or if Vietnamese didn't have a name for the color until they established trade with Europeans, and decided to follow their lead in using the same name as the fruit?

In Japanese, you would usually say オレンジ色 (orenji-iro), orange colour, オレンジ being a foreign loan word. But the older way to say the colour is 橙色 (daidai-iro), where daidai is Japanese for orange.

I have no idea what caused this shift between the native word for the fruit to a foreign word for the fruit to describe the colour.

What's the traditional Japanese name for the colour of the Saffron robes worn by Buddhist monks? Was the saffron colour considered distinct from other orange colours?

I’m not an expert on Buddhism or Japan, but I found this[0] on Wikipedia which states that the colour is 藤黄 (tou-ou), wisteria yellow. Today I learned that wisteria can be yellow.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_colors_of_Japan

The ancient Dravidian language mentioned in this article is "Tamil" where citrus fruits are associated with the word "narumanam"(fragrance) or "naatram"(bad smell). Narthangai which is a native citrus fruit. But I don't think Orange or Mandarin are local to Southern India.

The language mentioned there is not Tamil, but Proto-Dravidian, a reconstructed ancestor of it. Tamil is younger than Sanskrit (both Classical and Vedic), but Proto-Dravidian is a contemporary of Sanskrit.

Not true. I really hoped that Hacker News folks were careful enough not to repeat the Pro-Aryan propaganda. I never understand why people try to change history. We live in the present where we should strive for equality and not change history to push your agenda Pro-Aryan groups felt threatened that Tamil is a classical language older than Sanskrit and is very much alive unlike Sanskrit. This led them to spread propaganda about Tamil and calling any reference to Tamil before the age of Sanskrit as proto-Dravidian.

Even now, you can see the subjugation of Tamil History by the Indian government refusing to research the very important archeological find of Keezhadi.

Epigraphic research proves that much of the inscriptions from the Indus valley civilization is in Tamil. This threatens the Pro-Aryan groups for some unknown reason.

Can you point to a reputable source for the epigraphic claims about the Indus Valley?

http://www.archaeopress.com/ArchaeopressShop/Public/displayP...

Thanks. Will take some time to read & parse.

However, from skimming the text, I would have to agree with the sibling commentator, that pointed to the reconstructed Proto-Dravidian language, rather than Tamil. The book you've shared suggests links of the IVC with Proto-Dravidian, not Tamil directly. Tamil as a distinct language is not attested before the 3rd Century BCE, making it a contemporary of the Prakrits in the North, around the time of Ashoka. The Sangam Literature period starts from the 1st Century BCE, roughly contemporaneous with the advent of Indo-Greeks in the North. Tamil =/= Proto-Dravidian, which would indeed have been around at the time of the IVC. Whether the IVC had contact with Proto-Dravidian or were Proto-Dravidian themselves is still an open question. Even the preliminary Ancient DNA evidence from the IVC does not settle this matter conclusively. (I'm a Geneticist, not a linguist)

Do you have a source for the Indus valley thing? That seems interesting.

> This threatens the Pro-Aryan groups for some unknown reason.

If you want to be a supremacist, you have to be supreme to something, and anything that might question that (even hypotheses) is a threat to that feeling.

It has been a few years since I went down the rabbit hole of Indus valley - I did find one recent article https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/new-study-connects...

> If you want to be a supremacist, you have to be supreme to something, and anything that might question that (even hypotheses) is a threat to that feeling.

Yes, Sometimes I am too naïve for my own good

Hypotheses are useless if they are not backed up by any evidence. All our evidence points towards the existence of Proto-Dravidian, not of ancient Tamil.

I’m not advocating for the supremacy of Sanskrit, merely pointing out established linguistic facts. Tamil is old, yes, and it’s age is impressive given that early Tamil is still legible to modern Tamil speakers. That does not mean that Tamil is 3500 years old.

For example, we have no attested inscriptions of Tamil that predate 5th century BC. We do have Vedic inscriptions from 1400BC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_superstrate_in_Mi...

Narthangai in Tamil is Naranga in Malayalam. Not coincidentially, Naranja in Spanish/Portuguese is Orange. (I think this is an instance of Indian words migrating west, probably via Arabia.)

The reverse is also true - lot of words in Kerala which had sea-trade with Portugal and Spain, are close to their Portuguese/spanish equivalent, more than in other Indian languages. They are very closely related to the Iberian terms

- papaya

- sabola (Malayalam) versus Cebolla (Spanish/Portuguese)

- kashuandi (Cashew nut)

Other related terms like kappalandi (ship nuts - i.e. peanuts) indicate sea trade and that they were not endemic to India.

Looking at Malayalam terms gives a good indication as to which foods came to India via sea trade, possibly from South America, since the South was often the port of call. The only major exception I know is Mulaku (chillies) - even though chillies came from South America, the word does not indicate that.

>Other related terms like kappalandi (ship nuts - i.e. peanuts) indicate sea trade and that they were not endemic to India.

Reminds me of the Shibboleth about Kappalandi vs Kadala in Malayalam, where the choice of vocabulary points to which region you come from (North vs South Kerala).

In Irish there is no word for the colour orange, even though there is orange on the flag. The technical term is flan bhui or “flag yellow”. Oraiste is the word for the fruit which is sometimes used to describe the colour.

Interesting. I always assumed that “oráiste” was the word for the colour as well as the fruit. Out of curiosity, I looked up the translation for the Orange Order which gives two translations: “an tOrd Oráisteach” and “na Fir Bhuí” (the yellow men):

https://www.focloir.ie/en/dictionary/ei/Orange+Order

Yeah I’ve a feeling that might be something to do with it ...

>In Italian it was originally narancia, and in French narange, though the word in both of these languages eventually dropped the “n” at the beginning to become arancia and orange, probably from a mistaken idea that the initial “n” sound had carried over from the article, una or une.

This actually happened pretty often with some words

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing#Examples_of_false...

"Golden Apple" is still the word used today in modern Hebrew for orange, albeit in abbreviated form. I've always wondered where it came from.

Golden apple is a tomato (pomodoro) in Italian.

Was hoping to learn more about the lack of rhymes for the word "orange" in English, and if that's true in the upstream languages. Maybe in the sequel...

(Edit: typos and clarity)

If you are interested in colours and where many originated and became available and used Victoria Finlay has written a great book called Colour

This Tom Scott video is also great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ It ties languages to color and what they mean respectively, specifically how it can differ depending on the tongue spoken. For instance, in the US, the middle traffic light is called a yellow light whereas in French, it's an orange light. I spent my first few years in France, to this day, those lights are orange to me, even in California.

In Japan the go light is called blue. It is bluish, but definitely green to my eyes.

Nothing unique about Japan there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

"In many languages, the colors described in English as "blue" and "green" are colexified, i.e. expressed using a single cover term."

It goes on to list several dozen languages that do it.

Brazilians have both words but also draw the line differently than my European eyes do. The so called "Verde mar" is definitely blue to me and my American colleagues

As I commented sidethread, I was disturbed -- as an American growing up in America -- that the language always referred to the sea as blue when, if you look at it with your eyes, it's obviously green.

Perhaps the sea is greener near Portugal and Brazil inherited the description, in the same way that Americans inherited the description of a blue sea and never bothered to reevaluate it?

Yea, in Vietnamese, blue is "blue-green like the sea" and green is "blue-green like a leaf", presumably a call-back to before the two colors were linguistically distinguished.

> blue is "blue-green like the sea"

Hmm. In contrast, it always bothered me that English idioms referred to the sea as blue when you can go look at it and it's a deep green. (Formative experiences of seeing what color the sea is took place in the Bay Area.)

Interestingly, trying to figure out what color Homer meant by his commonly used phrase "the wine-dark sea" was one of the things that led people to realize the links between language and color discussed in the article.

While the colors of the ocean and wine look pretty different to us, its apparently common in other languages to group them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

The green of an rgb monitor and the "forest" green of photosynthesis are pretty different, and it's kind of weird they are the same in English.

They are the same color, just with different brightness levels. If you make a table with RGB values: #00FF00, #008800, #004400, and #000000, you'll see the "lime" green move more towards a forest green. You're not adding other colors, just reducing the intensity of the color.

Blue is pretty similar. The #0000FF blue is pretty different from a nice #000044 navy blue.

Older incandescent traffic lights were _really_ green. The newer LED lights are much more blue-tinted.

In the UK it was mixed. Different people made the coloured glass lenses, and some of the manufacturers had more blue in the lens.

This was an attempt to colour correct the yellow light given off by some incandescent lamps.

The way I was taught is that ao (青) covers all shades of blue and green, although depending on context its meaning can be limited to blue.

So for instance if both ao (青) and midori (緑) are used to designate sports teams, then the ao (青) team will be the blue team.

Due to this ambiguity with the word ao (青) it's in general better to use a more precise word to specify the shade of blue/green, like koniro (紺色) for deep blue, mizuiro (水色) for light blue, midori (緑) for green, etc.

I've always been confused by the confusion between yellow and orange. I've had people insist that pumpkins are yellow for example. And Yellow Freight (now YRC) has always had an orange logo.

Also "Bright Earth : Invention of Colour" by Philip Ball.

Orange is a shade of brown. We have a great many words for "brown", and "brown" is not named in reference to an object.

Are you suggesting that we should rename all companies named after objects/words?

Actually it is vice-versa. Brown is a color whose hue is orange and which has low brightness.

You can use "orange" to describe a saturated or even a monochromatic color, at any brightness, so orange can be used to describe a color of light.

You cannot use "brown" for any color with high brightness, like you cannot use "black" or "gray" for colors with high brightness.

Given a brown color, if you increase its brightness, at a certain level it will no longer look brown.

I am colorblind and the way that you articulated your points really changed my understanding of colors. Thank you.

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