Which orange came first, the fruit or the color?

[Avocadorable]

[purplepoppy]

If you look at animals such as the red fox, red deer, red kite, red squirrel etc you'll notice they're closer to orange than red. That's because they were named before we used orange as a colour.

[LiamSawyer]

Oranges in are green when they're ripe not orange. They're turned the color orange by treating them with ethylene gas. So the color was probably sound first

[Surely]

If memory serves me correctly. The fruit is more green when it comes off the trees. They are colored to make them orange before they get to the store.

[Surely]

Thank you for the MHO.

[Likes2drive]

Probably the fruit since we had to call it something then anything else we saw that color was related to the fruits color whether it existed before oranges the English language had to have a word for it afterwards

[AviatorTom]

The color orange is one frequency in the the electromagnetic spectrum called visible light. Nature had the frequency there long before the fruit started growing on trees.

[AviatorTom]

As some have pointed out, the word "orange" most likely came to describe the color of the fruit, but the color itself existed long before that.

[Anonymous]

The word is of Indian origin and originally referred to the fruit which itself originated in parts of India, China and Myanmar. The usage of that word to refer to the color began later but it is of course the same word with the same origin.

[Opinion Owner]

This was strictly about the word by the way. If you mean the concept then of course the color orange did exist in nature before the evolution of the orange fruit.

[Static_In_The_Attic]

The fruit came first!

[DancingQueen16]

I'd say the color

[BLP11520]

The fruit 😉

[Avocadorable]

I thought so too but then @AviatorTom made a valid point.