The color orange is first used as a color word in 1502 by analogy with the fruit, like with indigo and olive. The fruit, in turn, is first described in English as orenge in the late 1300s, named after the French term “pome orenge”, which went on a journey through Italian “arancia”, Arabic “نارنج” (nāranj), and Persian “نارنگ” (nārang), finally originating with Sanskrit “नारङ्ग” (nāraṅga) around the tree’s original range in northern India.

Usages from 1502 through the early 1600s all say “orange-coloured”, eventually dropping the second word once it became implicit that orange was a real, proper color word. So wait, what was the English word for that color all that time before anyone speaking it knew what an orange was?

It looks like it displaced several other words. Often it was called the equivalent of “yellow-red”, ġeolurēad, like we sometimes say “blue-green” today for cyan or teal. Sometimes it was referred to using other similarly-colored things like saffron or citrine. In heraldry the color was called tawny. Finally, it was sometimes just called “red”, which had a wider definition back then. Elements of this can still be seen in things that are still referred to as “red” even though they are clearly orange, like “redhead”, “red-breasted robin”, or Mars being the “red planet”.