Language Matters | The orange’s origins: how it travelled from East to West and its name evolved
- The orange’s history starts in the Himalayan foothills 8 million years ago, with citron the first species to head west
- The mandarin orange cultivar was the last major citrus to travel westward, arriving in England from China in 1805
Oranges abound worldwide. Citrus, however, originated – 8 million years ago – in the southeast Himalayan foothills, a region including eastern Assam, India, northern Myanmar and western Yunnan province, in China, and subsequently dispersed into other parts of Southeast Asia, with local species diversification.
The first species to spread west was citron (Citrus medica), through Persia and the Southern Levant from the fourth and fifth centuries BC, then to the western Mediterranean in the second and third centuries BC, while lemon was known to the Romans by the late first century BC.
The sour or bitter orange (Citrus aurantium), the product of hybridisation in southern China or northern Indochina, was introduced to Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean in the 10th century.
Texts report it to have been brought from India to Oman, and then to Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, the Arabs playing a major role in its spread during the Arab Muslim Empire.
It is unsurprising then that the name “orange” originates in a Dravidian, possibly Tamil, root nurga, meaning “fragrant”, and, via the Sanskrit nāraṅga “orange tree”, it developed into the Persian nārang and Arabic nārandj.
The fruit continued to be spread, around 1100, to northern Africa, Sicily and the rest of the Mediterranean. Its name followed and evolved: narantsion in late Medieval Greek, the Venetian naranza and other similar Romance language forms.
