Welcome to Livlife. Where I am living my life out loud, for all to read.

This one goes out to Justin, because he was telling me how much he enjoys the knowledge that I share on my blog...and he likes to see his name in lights.

 

Okay, so the other night I was watching "Sex and the City" on TBS and a commercial comes on for orange juice. A thought pops into my head...are oranges called that because of the color, or is the color named so because of the fruit? So I turn to my mom and ask her that very question. She said: "you mean like a chicken or the egg thing?" Yep, that's exactly what I want to know. Mom didn't have the answer, so I looked it up. Shocking, I know.

 

Here's your next installment: I did some research in the Oxford English Dictionary. Which is the definitive dictionary  and is chock full of all sorts of useful information. I also googled it and came up with an etymology, which is really close, from Wikipedia. But we'll go with the most authoritative source. The OED gives this definition--

 

1. a. Any of various kinds of citrus fruit with a usually reddish-yellow rind when mature and an acid many-celled juicy pulp; spec. (a) (more fully Seville orange, bitter orange) the fruit of Citrus aurantium, whose pulp is bitter and which is now used chiefly for making marmalade; (b) (more fully sweet orange, China orange) the fruit of C. sinensis and its varieties, which has a pleasantly acid pulp and is used for eating and making juice.

 

It then goes on to tell of the earliest documented uses of the name, the earliest being 1400 AD.

Then, if you scroll to a later entry you see this definition--

 

4. A bright reddish-yellow colour like that of the skin of a ripe orange; any one of a number of shades occupying the region between red and yellow in the spectrum. Also: a pigment or dye of this colour.

 

-AND-

 

a. Of the colour of an orange (see A. 4).

 

And the earliest documented usage of this definition...wait for it...here it comes....1532! Which is a full 132 years after they named the fruit. So, the answer is the chicken! Or is it the egg?

 

Okay, so I didn't solve that one, but now we know that the color orange is derived from the color of the skin of the fruit. I would have thought it were the other way around. Glad I checked.  Well, Justin, did you learn something?