What about the color orange?

Names of colors are arbitrary. Many of them are borrowed from fruits or plants: cherry, orange, grape, mint, indigo. Purple, cerise, crimson, and others are named after insects and things that live in the sea.

If you want an anomaly, consider indigo. Go look at a rainbow, between blue and violet. See anything? Some people see a color, some see only a space. Some people remember seeing a color when they were young but no longer see it after they grow up. Indigo is the color of blue jeans, egg plant, blue corn, and various other vegetables. It can not be produced on a computer monitor. That color simply is not in the equipment.

It was Isaac Newton who decreed that there are seven colors, because there are seven days in the week. He never tried to explain any further than that. He also assigned the names that we use today, with no explanation at all.

They called it red or yellow--- depending who was looking at it---before they had a name for the color.

But when does red end and orange begin? It likely came as a name only after oranges were imported---and then applied to the color between red and yellow---in the cases of differences of opinion (red/yellow) Colors then were still named after something "color of blood" "Color of grass" "Color of sky", for example "Color of an orange" was later added too- Only later, did language change, and colors become names unto them selves. (red, green blue, etc)

Color is one of those strange cases where we only perceive colors we have a name for. Art students using the color wheel of 12 colors often report being able to see "new" colors such as yellow-green or orange-yellow----Once they now have a name for those colors,

It gets stranger still, many south sea islanders use the same name for both blue and green, and will even sort threads with those colors together when matching color shades. Aussie Aborigines, "see" only reds, oranges and purples. By contrast, Eskimos, can see 100 or so colors of snow, which we would call "white" . But then again, westerners have been known to be able to LEARN the Eskimo colors--and see them too,

Of course the eyes can SENSE over a million colors, but we only perceive (register in the mind) a few of them, based on our Names we have for them; An excellent example of how our vocabularies can effect our perceptions.

See also the Wikipedia article "Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativit... , especially the "Berlin & Kay" section after the into.

The Spanish word for orange is naranja and it probably derived from there and possibly Latin.

Sanskrit.. try that one..