Thursday, January 19, 2012

Nothing Rhymes With Orange



FUN FACT: The word orange is derived from the Sanskrit word "narangah" which means "orange tree." The Sanskrit word is derived from the Dravidian root for "fragrant."


Thank you Shaw's grocery store weekly email!

Mister and I were fairly recently discussing this, as most people learn in elementary school that nothing rhymes with orange or purple (expect nurple which is of course made up). Yet, it's also super obvious that orange is a loan word in all of Europe (l'orange, arancia, etc.). I proposed the theory that in whatever language it came from, it probably could rhyme.

Now on to find out if narangah rhymes in Sanskrit...

2 comments:

  1. The Spanish for orange-the-fruit is "naranja" (with the 'j' sounding like an 'h') but orange-the-color is "anaranjado" (again with the 'j' sounding like an 'h')

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  2. So that's even closer than orange! And I poked around at it some more, and it possibly comes from Tamil: aru (five) anju (six) in reference to the 11 sections of an orange. Mister immediately started calling it "five and six fruit". :-P

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