When I was a kid in art class, I learned that you make orange by mixing red and yellow paints. As my art teacher told me, red and yellow are primary colours, and when you mix them, you get a secondary colour. With words like primary and secondary, what I took from his lesson was that orange is a lesser colour, maybe parasitic on the more legitimate colours. It has taken me a lifetime to undo that bias and give orange the recognition it deserves.
Part of the reason we don’t acknowledge orange as a colour in its own right is that, for centuries, at least in the English language, we didn’t have a word for it. In a book called On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, we learn that people used to describe the colour associated with wavelengths of 590 – 620 nm as red-yellow or yellow-red. It wasn’t until the people of England were introduced to a certain citrus fruit that the word “orange” began to describe things that share the fruit’s colour. And it wasn’t until the beginning of the 18th century that the word “orange” was used to denote the colour itself. So, yes, orange the fruit came before orange the colour and not the other way around. Just imagine what would have happened if people in England were introduced to the pumpkin first.
