Orange (word)

The word "orange" entered Middle English from Old French and Anglo-Norman orenge. The earliest recorded use of the word in English is from the 13th century and referred to the fruit. The first recorded use of "orange" as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor. Other sources cite the first recorded use as 1512, in a will now filed with the Public Record Office. It is generally thought that Old French calqued the Italian melarancio ("fruit of the orange tree", with mela "fruit") as pume orenge (with pume "fruit"). Although pume orenge is attested earlier than melarancio in available written sources, lexicographers believe that the Italian word is actually older. The Principality of Orange was named for this place and not for the color. Some time after the sixteenth century, though, the color orange was adopted as a canting symbol of the House of Orange-Nassau. The color eventually came to be associated with Protestantism, as a result of the participation by the House of Orange on the Protestant side in the French Wars of Religion, the Irish campaigns, and the Dutch Eighty Years' War. ==Pronunciation==

With forest, warrant, horrible, etc., orange forms a class of English words where the North American pronunciation of what is pronounced as , the vowel in lot, in British Received Pronunciation varies between the vowel in north ( or depending on the cot–caught merger) and that in lot ( or depending on the father–bother merger). The former is more common while the latter is mainly found on the East Coast of the United States. While many dictionaries of North American English include the north pronunciation as the primary or only variant, Merriam-Webster lists the lot variant first and glosses the north variant as "chiefly Northern & Midland" for orange but not for other words in the class (forest etc.). Its Collegiate Dictionary listed north first until the 1973 eighth edition, but has flipped the order since the 1983 ninth edition. Merriam-Webster is also unique in including monosyllabic variants (). == Rhyme == No common English word is a full rhyme for "orange", though there are half rhymes, such as "hinge", "lozenge", "syringe", and "porridge". Slang and otherwise uncommon examples exist. Although this property is not unique to the word—one study of 5,411 one-syllable English words found 80 words with no rhymes—the lack of rhyme for "orange" has garnered significant attention, and inspired many humorous verses. Although "sporange", a variant of "sporangium", is an eye rhyme for "orange", it is not a true rhyme as its second syllable is pronounced with an unreduced vowel , and often stressed. There are a number of proper nouns which rhyme or nearly rhyme with "orange", including The Blorenge, a mountain in Wales, and Gorringe, a surname. US Naval Commander Henry Honychurch Gorringe, the captain of the , who discovered Gorringe Ridge in 1875, led Arthur Guiterman to quip in "Local Note": The slang word "blorange", a hair color between blond and orange, is a rhyme. It is attested from the early 2000s and appears in fashion-related media from about 2017. Various linguistic or poetic devices provide for rhymes in some accents. Compound words or phrases may give true or near rhymes. Examples include "door-hinge", "torn hinge", "or inch", and "a wrench". William Shepard Walsh attributes this verse featuring two multiple-word rhymes to Walter William Skeat: Enjambment can also provide for rhymes. One example is Willard Espy's poem, "The Unrhymable Word: Orange". Another example by Tom Lehrer relies on the /ˈɑrəndʒ/ pronunciation commonly used on the East Coast of the United States: Rapper Eminem is noted for his ability to bend words so that they rhyme. In his song "Business" from the album The Eminem Show, he makes use of such word-bending to rhyme "orange": Nonce words are sometimes contrived to rhyme with "orange". Composers Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel wrote the song "Oranges Poranges" to be sung by the Witchiepoo character on the television programme H.R. Pufnstuf. == See also ==